Cleo Abram: What Could Go Right?

Emmy-nominated video journalist Cleo Abram joins Trevor and Eugene to talk about Huge If True, her hit YouTube series that takes an optimistic approach to science and emerging technology. The three explore how asking “what could go right?” might be the most powerful tool we have for moving humanity forward, why optimism isn’t naïve but necessary, and how the physics of curling (the most divisive Olympic sport) can be used as an example of pessimism keeping us from imagining a better world.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Trevor Noah?

  Oh wait, let's talk about Aliens, actually.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  That's good.

• 0:06Trevor Noah?

  Eugene is a huge fan of Aliens.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  I am also. I love Aliens.

• 0:10Trevor Noah?

  Have you discovered anything?

• 0:13Speaker 02

  Apparently, we're close to making first contact in the next two years or so.

• 0:16Trevor Noah?

  You see, I love it. Now we're at the party, he's just said that.

• 0:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's a guy called...

• 0:20Trevor Noah?

  First, have your drink and say it. I think it sets the scene.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  We're at a party.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  Hey, yeah, I am.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  So, Aliens.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  So, there's an extraterrestrial being that comes to a guy called Daryl Anker.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  Don't you just hate it when your pessimistic friend is a DJ?

• 0:55Trevor Noah?

  This is What Now with Trevor Noah.

• 1:02Trevor Noah?

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• 1:37Trevor Noah?

  This segment is brought to you by Google Pixel. You know what's really frustrating? Knowing the exact information you need is somewhere on your phone, but still ending up wasting your time digging through five different apps just to actually find it. Thankfully, Google Pixel 11 is designed with Gemini intelligence, so it can proactively find the information I need right when I need it. Like my flight info on travel days or my calendar when Eugene texts me to hang out. Oh, sorry Eugene, I'm booked. Learn more about what Google Pixel 11 can do at googlestore.com. These AI features are available in select countries and languages for users 18 and over, and make sure to check responses.

• 2:22Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, booked forever, forever. This episode is brought to you by Verizon.

• 2:29Trevor Noah?

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• 3:14Trevor Noah?

  all-inclusive music festivals, and the chance to meet your favorite stars. Plus, daily drops, tickets, and pre-sale access all week. So, let's recap. Cash back in your pocket every month with Verizon Dollars and epic experiences from Verizon Shine every Monday all year round. Now, those are some rewarding rewards. Only from Verizon. Enroll today at Verizon.com.

• 3:42Trevor Noah?

  You take your time.

• 3:45Trevor Noah?

  You take your time. You just go ahead and take your time. Every moment, every second you need. You just take it. Do they have that on YouTube? I know they have subtitles and dubbing, but can you dub to other accents? That would be dope. That would be nice. We should just have the whole episode in a southern accent.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  They, I think you should do that for this episode.

• 4:06Trevor Noah?

  We really should.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  I think you should ADR it after.

• 4:09Trevor Noah?

  Just do the whole thing.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  What's ADR?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Uh, I think it's the word for...

• 4:12Speaker 02

  I'm techno-challenged.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  I actually don't know what the... I, I, oh, I did what I always do, which is using an acronym when I don't know what it stands for. I think what ADR means is when they go back in a movie and make the same sounds again when they didn't catch it.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  I don't know, you've acted in movies.

• 4:30Trevor Noah?

  No, that is ADR.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Is that right?

• 4:33Trevor Noah?

  Ha, additional dialogue recording. But they should have a name for it when it's over the other one, because not additional. This is the same dialogue recording.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, just do it again.

• 4:42Trevor Noah?

  It should be called DDR, duplicate dialogue recording.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  And you can upload your own audio files on YouTube.

• 4:48Trevor Noah?

  What do you mean?

• 4:49Speaker 01

  So you could post the video.

• 4:50Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  And then you post another audio file. And I think you'd have to call it, you'd have to choose a language. I don't think like Southern Americans.

• 4:57Trevor Noah?

  Actually, we should start doing that. We'll make every episode in another accent as well. Because people, people think of everyone who speaks other languages.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 5:05Trevor Noah?

  But what about other accent speakers? What about them?

• 5:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, no one cares about them.

• 5:08Trevor Noah?

  We could be doing this whole episode in an English accent. Eugene, I, I say Eugene.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  I couldn't, but you could.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the universal African accent must never see the light of day ever again.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  I'm definitely not.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Because whoever came up with that universe, because even in Africa.

• 5:21Trevor Noah?

  Are you, you with your accent, are you talking about? You see, I can't even like do it, it's hard.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, that accent.

• 5:28Trevor Noah?

  It's in like every movie where there's Africans, but they're not African.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 5:32Trevor Noah?

  Africans hear it, but where it's a very, it's a very specific kind of accent. I don't even know how to do it because it's nowhere.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  You shouldn't know.

• 5:41Trevor Noah?

  It's nowhere.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Because if you did know.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Then you'd be like, oh.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  The booty.

• 5:50Trevor Noah?

  No, but do you, do you, um, you know, we were, we were talking about this just before we started recording. And I wonder if you have to think about this, you know, as, as your platform's grown, as you've gotten bigger. Do you have to think about balancing out like what you'll do for a view? And then what the views will do for the people who are viewing the thing?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Hmm. Tell me more about what you mean by that.

• 6:10Trevor Noah?

  So what we were chatting about earlier is, let's say I'm interviewing somebody on this show, right? We're hanging out here, it's me, Eugene, the person, whoever it is. Let's say they're a politician and then you go, like for instance, we had Zoran on, on the show. And then someone's like, oh, it would be cool if you did a thing on Trump and whatever. And then I go. It could be cool and it could be crazy and you could do whatever you want, right? So I could go off and do like, let's say I do like a mini roast of Trump or whatever. Here I am with Zoran. So he's like, Zoran Mamdani, the mayor of New York. And then you're like, oh, let's play out what happens. Or I was like, welcome, Zoran. Nice to see you in my office. Mama Danny, nice to see you. Mama Danny. Now, if he joins in and Trump sees that and Trump gets pissed off and then goes, oh, I'm gonna cut funding for New York. Was it worth it?

• 6:54Speaker 01

  No.

• 6:55Trevor Noah?

  That's my point.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:57Trevor Noah?

  So now, but I wouldn't have to think that if we only had like 50 viewers. Then you just do whatever you want.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you wouldn't feel good about it, even if you had 50.

• 7:07Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I would definitely feel good about it. Do you, how can you not feel good about an act out?

• 7:11Speaker 01

  It, well, I'll just say about my show, I've constructed the whole thing so that it prevents that question. Because the premise of the show is I'm gonna genuinely explain something to you. That's complicated, that I want you to understand. I'm gonna do it in a way that is, in the end, optimistic. You're gonna have a specific feeling about like, oh, there are smart people working on a hard problem and I can see how we could make this better. And then it's gonna be visual and beautiful and joyful all at the same time. And if it does those three things.

• 7:47Trevor Noah?

  Visual, beautiful and joyful.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Hmm, it's.

• 7:50Trevor Noah?

  That's how I think of Eugene. Whenever I look at you, Eugene, that's what I think of. I think you are visual, I think you are joyful, and I think you are beautiful.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  That's really beautiful.

• 8:00Trevor Noah?

  It's not often.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Your hands are warm and mine are cold, that was nice.

• 8:04Trevor Noah?

  Let's go.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  The three things, no, the three things are genuinely good explainer, genuinely optimistic, and visually stunning, a visual piece. And so if it's those three things, then it gets to be on huge. And if it's not one of those things, then it shouldn't be there. And so that prevents a lot of the. Yeah, yeah, yeah, those are the criteria.

• 8:23Trevor Noah?

  It's a no star.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if so, it's not one of those things, then the pressure is on me and on my team and on, I mean, frankly, the audience now now knows like what feels like huge and what doesn't. And it it's a pressure that counterweights a lot of the other pressures on journalists and on

• 8:41Trevor Noah?

  Okay, okay, got it, got it.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  To be clickbaity, to be pessimistic, to be

• 8:46Trevor Noah?

  Unstrupulous and sensitive.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:48Trevor Noah?

  All of those things, no?

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a it's a counterweight. And I'm not saying like it's it's perfect every time. We we also think a lot about how do I do those three things in a way that millions of people want to watch? So there's absolutely like a storytelling element to it. But it strips away a lot of the things that I didn't like as a journalist, that I don't want to watch, that aren't in the end helpful for me to actually understand something, make me feel optimistic about the future that I can participate in building. And that use the fact that it's a video, right? Like, watching a video requires a lot of your time and attention. It requires your eyes in addition to your ears. And so I think a lot about how do I earn that from my audience? So anyway, if those if I'm doing those three things,

• 9:32Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  then it should be on the show. And in those moments where like you can feel the pressure to to do something else because you think it'll spike in viewership.

• 9:41Trevor Noah?

  I mean, everyone talks about that. Everyone who's been involved in YouTube. Because I because I think there's a there's a specific

• 9:50Trevor Noah?

  there's a delineation between the types of content you make when you when you're making it for like what we call like mainstream media, let's say. Your bosses have already confirmed it. It goes out, it's commissioned, it gets put on TV or in the movies and then it's done. YouTube, you are the boss. You're making you're making the decisions, you're putting it out there, you're doing your thing. So in essence, the only driving force behind whether it does or doesn't go out is you.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:15Trevor Noah?

  All right. But that means that people I remember talking to Jake Paul or Logan Paul. I always forget which brother. I think it was Jake. I think it was Jake, but it was and was interviewing him and we were talking about his life and his show. And then he talked about how The the click cycle got him.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 10:34Trevor Noah?

  He did one thing.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 10:35Trevor Noah?

  He he he fell somewhere, he broke something and the people like more of that, more of that. And they didn't say it verbally, but people loved it.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:42Trevor Noah?

  And then him and his team were like, you gotta do it again. And then you're jumping off the top of your stairs, the banister in your in your house. And people like more, more.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  You're going high and high.

• 10:49Trevor Noah?

  And the next thing you know, you're in like, you know, a forest, a suicide forest in Japan. And you are looking at yourself going, how did I get here?

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  But stand up has a lot of those elements, right?

• 10:59Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah, definitely.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Stand up when we first started was just us trying to see how far we can push the envelope.

• 11:03Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, you're not wrong.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  And then you get one TV gig and now you have to be careful. You get one endorsement now they're like, also, are you gonna say that for real, real, real?

• 11:10Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but it's almost the other way around, funny enough, with stand up now that you mention it.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 11:14Trevor Noah?

  It's almost like stand up, they they almost calm you down in a way. Cause as stand ups, what we're trying, you see like your rules, I I don't know about all stand ups, but like I I can say for myself. And this gentleman seated seated across from me, this fine squire right here across from me. I would say it's like if we think of our rules, you go, do we find it interesting?

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:34Trevor Noah?

  Do we think it's funny?

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:37Trevor Noah?

  Then that's it. It's it's as simple as, it doesn't matter where it goes and how it goes.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 11:41Trevor Noah?

  You're trying to break everything, you're trying to.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Things that you know the audience might like, that you don't think are funny. That you think are just not, it'll make you feel good.

• 11:50Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  That would, that that helps a lot. That feeling like for me, it's these three criteria I've come up with this and it helps to have a. I think what I'm what I'm really coming to in this is it really helps to have a mission.

• 12:04Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I like that, okay.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Really helps. These criteria are part of the overall mission of the show, which is in my case, and everyone chooses their own. My mission is I make this show so I can show people with those three criteria. Explain to them things in an optimistic way, in a visually beautiful way.

• 12:24Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  I make this show so I can show people visions of the future. Because I believe that if they see those visions in an optimistic way, they can help build them.

• 12:34Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  So my goal, I'm not an engineer, I'm not a scientist. My goal is to present who's working on hard things and how are they doing it? And what could it potentially do? And how could it go wrong? And how could it go right?

• 12:43Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  And make a optimistic explainer video that helps people see if you're watching it in the audience. And maybe you are someone who could help. And I believe that everybody can in their own way.

• 12:53Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  You can help participate in making that better somehow.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  I look at people like you with a mission and I go, why do you care?

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Well, now we could get into all kinds of, you know, my, the way that I grew up and, and why I want to do this work.

• 13:07Trevor Noah?

  Then let's do it.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Let's do it. I'm happy to. Let's do it.

• 13:12Trevor Noah?

  I like how you said it like, we don't have an option. You're like, no, well, then I gotta get into this. You've come to the right place. Why did you get it? Cause I remember when I, so I'll, I'll give you a bit of context. When I first came across your work, I had just started on The Daily Show. So, um, I joined The Daily Show in 2015, right? When Jon Stewart was still around. And so I was just a correspondent. Jon would phone me, be like, come and do this funny thing. I would be like, yeah. And then we'd leave and then, you know what I mean? Back and forth, back and forth. Jon announces he's leaving. They find a new host. The host happens to be me. I've shrunk the process down, but before I was gonna host the show, I went through this like, I want to say like six, seven month period of just, I mean, like gorging on every piece of content that I could.

• 13:57Trevor Noah?

  Cause I just had to learn about this new country and this new place, but from the inside, you know? So what's the news? Where's the news coming from? And then America's unique. And I guess now it's not as unique as, as it was at that time. In that the news doesn't just come from one place. Yeah. You know, so we grew up where it was like, did you watch the news?

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:14Trevor Noah?

  Yes, I watched the news. And then now here it's like, which news? Who's news? Who's news? Who said it's the news? So now I'm watching all news, collecting all news. And I remember coming across your work and at the time it was on Vox, right? Yeah. And Vox was this new platform that had come out and they were explaining stuff and they made the news digestible. And let me tell you, if there's somebody who needed stuff explained,

• 14:39Trevor Noah?

  this guy right here. Cause I was like, what, what, what is a filibuster? Wait, what is happening? Who's passing the laws? Who gerrymandering? Who's Jerry? Why is he mandering? What is going on here? Bro, I was like, what is happening in this country? And you know, the funny thing is, um, Americans will make it seem like they know what's happening. They make it look like everything is normal. Yeah. And then when you find out about it and then you ask most Americans, they'll be like, I actually don't, I, I actually don't. And, and not in like a shit way. It's just, there's, there's so many intricate little details to the system. And that's when I came across your work. You're making these videos, making these videos, making these videos. And it was doing pretty well. And then you, you just left. And you left when things were going well at Vox and you were just gone. This is the best time to leave anything. I mean, that's the craziest.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  There you have to, you really have to wait for a workman's comp.

• 15:32Trevor Noah?

  Leave your marriage. Eugene's advice, leave your marriage on a high. Make sure to leave your marriage on a high. Honey, can I just say, I am having the best time ever with, I love you so much, I love you so much. I'm leaving. What? Yeah, I mean, I just figured. Eugene's advice. So, so take us.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  He wasn't like that.

• 15:55Trevor Noah?

  No, so, so, so let's go back, let's, let's, let's try and understand.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:00Trevor Noah?

  I think as Eugene eloquently pointed out, how do we, how do we get to the core of this person who wants to make things that are optimistic and informative and visually beautiful in a world where you get more reward for making things that are negative and rage baity and, because you could have a big show on YouTube doing that. You could go, let me show you why the hadron collider is going to kill all of us. Let me show you why dinosaurs are going to come back and kill all of us. Let me show you why asteroids are going to kill all of, you could, you could make that. And I think it would maybe do slightly better than what you currently have.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  In the very short term, maybe.

• 16:31Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I like this. So let's, let's go down a rabbit hole.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  You're good.

• 16:34Trevor Noah?

  How do we meet you at this point? What, what, what happened in your life that made you this person?

• 16:37Speaker 01

  So I was, if we rewind all the way back, I was a kid who, I grew up in Washington DC. And my parents were both lawyers. And my mom was working for Congress and my dad was a litigator and he did a lot of death penalty cases. And we would talk about these things, we would talk about my homework and we would talk about their work at the dinner table. And I, both of my parents were the kind of people where if I gave them something that I'd written, they would like cross out the lines really brutally and say like, there's a simpler way to say this. Like you can always say it in a simpler way that people can better understand.

• 17:10Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  And my dad, in these, these cases that he would work on, I really saw as a young kid, how if you can explain something complicated in a way that 12 normal people can understand, you can actually save someone's life. Like in a real way, like that's what he was demonstrating when I was a kid. And I guess that lesson stuck with me. It's hard, sometimes it's easier now to draw lines from, you know,

• 17:36Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Like now I see how that's connected. At the time, like it was just a, a thing that I knew. And I grew up and I go to college and I graduate and I begin working at Vox, V O X. And Vox at the time was doing explainer journalism, which I loved.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  And I'll shorten the story somewhat, but

• 17:55Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, there's no rush. There's no rush here. We were fully in.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Great.

• 17:59Trevor Noah?

  You only need to start, Eugene does the yawn, then we

• 18:03Speaker 01

  I'll look for it.

• 18:04Trevor Noah?

  It's a very special, it's a very special type of yawn that Eugene has. It's fake, but it works well on people. I'll, I'll show you an example now. I'm, I'm going to tell you about my morning. And then I'll show you, I'll show you how Eugene just gently lets you know that it's time to move on. So this morning, guys, I, I wanted to have oats. And you know how sometimes your oats are, you know, sometimes your oats are like

• 18:26Speaker 02

  I don't need you in my life.

• 18:30Trevor Noah?

  No, please go on, go on.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Um, so I, uh, we can come back to my journey inside Box because I started on the business side and then I began

• 18:40Trevor Noah?

  We're here for it all.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Oh, I, I'll promise. Um, but

• 18:46Speaker 01

  fast forward to, I'd been working as a journalist for a couple of years. And I'd been covering technology. I'd been making things for Explained on Netflix, which is a, a wonderful show that Vox made. Very intricate, deep dives into different things that matter in the world. I had made one on computer programming and one on diamonds explained, which are really fun to work on.

• 19:07Trevor Noah?

  I've seen that one.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Really?

• 19:08Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 19:09Trevor Noah?

  We talked about artificial diamonds versus

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, we went through the whole like science and the geology and then the history of like why we buy diamonds. Yes. And then we ended on artificial diamonds. It was so fun to make. I loved doing that.

• 19:20Trevor Noah?

  I loved that. It was so good.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 19:22Trevor Noah?

  It made me feel smart because I was like, oh, there is a, yeah, okay.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 19:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Um, so I, I've been working on, on Vox in that way. But I also was a, is a person who loves learning about technology and I was looking at my media diet. And I was really unhappy with it. I was really frustrated. And I, I think to boil down the reason that I was frustrated was I felt like there was this knee jerk pessimism in the news that I was consuming.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  That was preventing me from understanding what was really happening in the world, and also, understanding how I could participate in making the world a better place.

• 20:00Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  And I, in doing some research, I happened upon an article, I was looking through the New York Times Archive for reporting reasons, and I found an article from 1903, October 9, 1903, and it was called "Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly." This is, like, you can go into the New York Times Archive and find this article. It talks about how we will basically never have planes. It talks about how-

• 20:28Trevor Noah?

  When is this?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  This is 1903.

• 20:31Trevor Noah?

  We will never have planes.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  We will never have planes. They basically say, it boils down to, if it took birds thousands of years to develop evolutionarily the ability to fly-

• 20:40Trevor Noah?

  Wow, I love this.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  It'll take humans millions of years. And it ends, my favorite line in this piece, I still remember it, is something like-

• 20:46Trevor Noah?

  Good luck.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  It's basically, it basically is like, it basically is like, "The effort might be employed more profitably," or something. It was 1903 they were writing like this.

• 20:55Trevor Noah?

  That's beautiful.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  And, so basically, they were saying, like, "Do other things, this'll never work."

• 20:59Trevor Noah?

  Effort might be employed profitably elsewhere.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  More profitably elsewhere.

• 21:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  October 9, 1903. December 17, 1903. Two months later, was when the Wright brothers took their first assisted flight.

• 21:11Trevor Noah?

  No way.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Two months later. And I looked at that, and I put the timeline together, and I was like, "What? Like, that matters to me, somehow." Like, something, something is wrong here. And we've been doing this, and it felt similar to what we were doing today. It wasn't just like a thing they did in 1903. This was like a knee-jerk pessimism about some, about new technologies, or, or dreams, or scientific efforts. "Oh, that won't work." Or, "Once it starts to work, oh, people won't want it." Or, "This'll go really, really wrong, and there's no way it'll help people, this is only gonna hurt people." And I looked at that, and I thought, like, first, this isn't a modern thing. I feel like it's been getting worse for reasons we can talk about, but like, this has been happening, look at this article from 1903.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  But then also- Why does that matter? Like, why care? Maybe the media is generally a little bit pessimistic. Maybe there's also this hype cycle that happens sometimes, and that's also a problem. And so altogether, like, why is this really a problem? What, why should I start some new show that's gonna offer something different?

• 22:15Speaker 01

  And I think there are two problems with that pessimism. The first is that it stops the conversation from getting interesting. Like, if I tell you airplanes, they just won't work. We'll have like a five-minute conversation about why airplanes won't work.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  But you'll never get to the conversation about like, wait, if they work, that means that people are gonna start living in different places than their families. That means that people are gonna start traveling to other countries. That means that global trade is gonna fundamentally change a lot in the next 100 years. Like, if you told my grandfather what that was gonna look like, and just that, I mean, he was alive when planes existed, but like, just that the absolute skyrocketing of the commercial airline industry, that would have been a fascinating conversation. If you'd said, like, let's just assume that it works for the purpose of this conversation. That's basically what I try and do on my show. And let's assume all the ways in which it could go awry. Like, okay, now we can have a conversation about CO2 emissions. Now we can have a conversation about, like, the impacts of tourism. You know, like, but you only get to those conversations about real problems

• 23:16Speaker 01

  when you assume that it's gonna work, and you don't have that pessimism. So that's the first reason. And then the second reason, the thing that was really frustrating me was there's this kind of, maybe it's a nihilism that takes hold when people don't believe that the world can get better and that they can help make that happen. It's like, if the world is just getting worse, and I can't do anything about it, and I'm not seeing stories about people that are helping make it better, and I'm not imagining technologies like quantum computers, for example, I'm only imagining the ways in which they're gonna be a security problem and not the ways in which they're gonna help develop new medicines and new materials. Then I, like, why do I, why should I try? Why shouldn't I just be very self-interested?

• 23:54Speaker 02

  So pessimism coupled with helplessness always goes well together.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  That's a much more succinct way to put it, yeah.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Like your dad said.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  You just scratched up the thing and you're just like, bam!

• 24:04Trevor Noah?

  Pessimism combined with helplessness.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Is bad.

• 24:07Trevor Noah?

  Go do your homework.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  We're trying to do the opposite.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  You know, I, I, I often find that a healthy amount of pessimism is a good catalyst for people to act. So you've, you've often heard people who are very successful talking about the teacher that told them they'll never amount to anything.

• 24:22Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  Then we have that conversation in hindsight of them being successful and the teacher seemingly being pessimistic and, and negative.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were reacting to it.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  But they had to have the optimism, right?

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  They had to like push off against.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  Yes, they never speak about optimism that they had to have to push against the pessimism.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:41Trevor Noah?

  That's, that's true, but I sometimes think to myself, in that same situation to what you're saying, I think a more positive catalyst is one that sort of prompts your optimism as opposed, you know, because I think of how many people are defeated by that, that statement. You will never, you'll never amount to anything, you'll never be anything, you'll never go anywhere. I think it works on a lot of people because if your teacher's telling you that. Who knows you better?

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:07Trevor Noah?

  Do you know what I mean? If someone's like, hey, I've been looking at your body of work from the age of eight to 11. Yo, man, this shit's not gonna work out for you in life.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  But teachers never say that.

• 25:18Trevor Noah?

  No, they say.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Remember that teacher is per grade because people always remember one snippet of their school career where one teacher said that. And it's very rare that you go with a teacher from grade zero.

• 25:28Trevor Noah?

  No, we went with like in primary school.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  We like. So the same teacher said this to you for 12 years.

• 25:33Trevor Noah?

  Where you met them literally.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  What evil teacher did you have?

• 25:35Trevor Noah?

  No, but this is what I'm trying to say to you. We all knew that and there was always like that teacher, everyone knew them as that teacher. Do you get what I'm saying?

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Wherever they catch you, they'll tell you.

• 25:43Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  The number of people who must have been inspired also by a teacher who said, by the way, have you ever considered that you could do this? Like, I've actually heard more stories like that in the end of, of teachers. When I think about my life, I think about the teachers who said like, oh, you're very interested in this. Have you read this book? Have you like done it? They're sort of fueling you in this way. And I sometimes think of the show that we now make, um, the show is called Huge If True, that I left Vox to make this show independently on YouTube.

• 26:12Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  And I think about it like that. I think about it like offering a menu of.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Stories and options and futures that could come true.

• 26:21Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  To people that might be able to help make them happen. Or to an audience that just wants to understand what they could potentially do with their lives and with their time or with their free time.

• 26:30Trevor Noah?

  You take for granted how powerful that is because I don't know if you've seen any of the polls that people have conducted around AI. When they asked the general public, what do you think of AI? And not like how it's being applied now, just AI as a concept.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:47Trevor Noah?

  The sentiment is generally negative. Like you go, would you trust machines? Would you trust an all powerful AI? Do you think it would be good for humanity? Without fail, a majority of the population says, no, it won't be good for us. It's gonna kill us. It's gonna take over. It's gonna, do you know what I mean?

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 27:04Trevor Noah?

  It's also interesting that most of those people have had their views shaped by the images of AI that they had growing up. So they watched Terminator.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:13Trevor Noah?

  They were watching Star Wars. They were watching, so they go like, oh, no, there's only one path that technology can take.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  It only goes this way.

• 27:19Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, it can only go this way and it can kill you.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 27:21Trevor Noah?

  An interesting poll that I saw the other day, and I was shocked by this, is people in Africa generally have a more positive attitude towards artificial general intelligence than people in the Western world.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, because we in Africa had to deal with racism for a long time.

• 27:38Trevor Noah?

  You see you, my man.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  And that was man made intelligence.

• 27:41Trevor Noah?

  You see you, my man.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  Try artificial.

• 27:42Trevor Noah?

  Ah ha.

• 27:48Trevor Noah?

  But I think.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  Eugene is the other half of my brain.

• 27:50Trevor Noah?

  You know, when people are like, your left brain, right brain, I'm like Eugene.

• 27:56Trevor Noah?

  But it's true. No, but it's exactly what you're saying.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:59Trevor Noah?

  Right, it's interesting how people who have assumed that the intelligence will be built around them and their histories and their pasts. Now think that that same technology will go on to do to them what they did to others.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:11Trevor Noah?

  But then the people who were only on like the receiving end in recent history of a thing.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:16Trevor Noah?

  Go like, oh, yeah.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Any change is good change.

• 28:18Trevor Noah?

  They could be like, maybe this will work.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, because it also puts us in an equal footing. I look at wars the same.

• 28:23Trevor Noah?

  Oh damn, I didn't think about that.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, because you don't know, I don't know. Let's see what this thing can do for us.

• 28:28Trevor Noah?

  AI would be the white people of everyone.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 28:30Trevor Noah?

  Hey, Vanna. Hey, Vanna.

• 28:35Trevor Noah?

  Because that.

• 28:36Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  You want?

• 28:42Speaker 01

  I do.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  You noticed?

• 28:51Trevor Noah?

  She wants a dip.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  You have to take us seriously.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Please continue with your point.

• 29:05Trevor Noah?

  Actually, that is a question that I have. And maybe it's because I'm comedy biased. It's just because of my brain. It's not like how I, I don't choose to have this filter on the world. But you also have humor in your content. You also.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Do I? I don't think, I mean, I'm not funny like you guys.

• 29:20Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, but I promise you there's humor in it. Like when I was watching your asteroid video, it's funny. Like the fact that you have Mark Rober voicing an asteroid, that's a funny thing to do, to be talking about the potential destruction of Earth and then use a funny person's voice on the video. That's funny. You know, when you're talking about like, when you're doing the dinosaurs one and you're going around with the archaeologists and you're brushing, there were funny moments in that.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Oh, you've really watched the show. This is awesome.

• 29:46Trevor Noah?

  Wow, that, why would I invite you here if I hadn't watched the show?

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Well, there would be a weird thing to do. Just be like, come and.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  No, but you've like seen, you remember, this is great. Yeah.

• 29:56Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  No, you're right.

• 29:57Trevor Noah?

  You know why? Because you teach well, genuinely. Because you teach well. It's easy to consume. It's easy to digest and it's engaging. But I remember the funny moments, even with like the Hadron Collider.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  All your key pillars have been taken off.

• 30:09Trevor Noah?

  Or when you like, when you were showing the quantum computer, I was just like, the size of it, the scale. But the jokes in between are something that I found myself fascinated about. I was like, why, why bring humor into something that most people go, this is, this is the future of mankind. There's no time for jokes, but you're bringing jokes in.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  I think it's, it's also that I'm, I'm the proxy for the audience. Like I know very little. I know how to tell a great story. I'm a really, really good visual storyteller, but I'm not an expert in anything that I'm talking about. And so that requires me to come in by understanding like, I'm the secondary character. The topic is the primary character. My goal, like, why learn from me about quantum computers? You learn from a quantum physicist on YouTube. Like, why am I there? The reason I'm there is so that I'm a proxy for the audience. I'm like, having fun with it, like you might have. I'm asking the questions that you might ask. I'm, I'm there to recontextualize what the expert is saying to kind of like, translate for them a little bit. Like, that's the magic of what we do.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Because the, the problem with that first bucket that we talked about, the, the feeling of like, oh, pessimism ends the conversation. Explainers that are too complicated, like, they're just not, they don't bring people in. The problem with that is you end up in a place where I think unfortunately, despite the fact that huge is growing really quickly, like, we're, we're, we're small compared to mainstream media. The, um, the place that we're in is one where like, most people hear about the future when it is, has largely been set up by a smaller number of people. And my belief is that if you bring people more into the earlier parts of the conversation, if you say like,

• 31:49Trevor Noah?

  Definitely.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  We're, we're gonna need to learn about quantum computers now. Though you're, you know, not actually interacting with them anytime soon. More people at the beginning of that process is a good thing.

• 32:00Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  More people, to your point about AI, more people are helping to build that system. If you show them what it is at the beginning. Versus saying, oh, it won't work. Oh, don't worry about it. Oh, this is not something that's gonna be accepted, not something that people are gonna want. It's not gonna be a, you know, maybe it'll change the world, but just you should be scared of it. That posture means that you are less likely to participate in helping it go right. And so that's something I think a lot about. Like, how can I make it fun enough and good enough and entertaining enough? So that you want to be a part of it earlier in the process. So like now, when you go about your day, you understand something about what we've discovered about dinosaurs. You understand something about CRISPR or quantum computers or supersonic planes. Like, maybe you won't work on those things tomorrow,

• 32:45Speaker 01

  but maybe there's some way in which that is part of your life and you at least know about these topics and you're, you're having conversations that are interesting and you're more a part of it than you would be otherwise. I believe that having more people understand complicated issues means that more people will participate in making sure that they go right.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  That's what I'm trying to do on my show.

• 33:05Trevor Noah?

  I like that you say that. I, um, I was in Washington State and I was at an event where we're working with Microsoft on basically like getting AI into schools, like having kids learn, teachers learn, whatever. And they set up this this program where the teachers are advising on it. So they're going, this is what we actually need AI to do. So don't just, don't just give us AI. This is what we need you to help AI or make AI do for teachers. You know, so it's lesson plans, it's helping them mark and grade and all these things.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  Teacher's aid.

• 33:35Trevor Noah?

  Exactly, it's supposed to be that.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  Not a teacher.

• 33:37Trevor Noah?

  Right, exactly. And then they will, and then parents also like, this is what we need AI to do. And we're at this launch event and I'll never forget this moment. One of the student journalist comes up and at the end, like all the other, like journalist, journalist, they've all asked their questions. And then this student journalist comes up and then asks the president of Microsoft, Brad Smith, goes, hey, I see that you've got this panel convened that's going to be doing all of this in the schools. Do you have any students on your panel?

• 34:03Speaker 01

  That's an amazing question.

• 34:05Trevor Noah?

  And all of us in the room were, you know, you're like, huh? All of us? And then Brad, to his credit, was like, no, I didn't think about that. And why don't we? And then literally on the spot was like, oh yeah, we we we got to do this. But to your point.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 34:21Trevor Noah?

  Even in that moment, I found myself going, oh yeah, you you you take for granted how we are constantly building futures, but not engaging all the people that the futures are being built for. And then when we get there, we're going to be like, how did we miss this? And it's like, yeah, but did you just ask everyone? Did you ask everyone what they, like Eugene, what do you need from AI? What do you want AI to do for you? Do you know what AI is? Let me start with this, because Eugene is very.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  Find out what AI is, first of all.

• 34:48Trevor Noah?

  Eugene is my ladite. Eugene is fully my ladite friend.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  I I always compare everything new with how things were before there was technology. So I hear what you're saying and I hear what he's saying and I combine it to. Before there was technology to disperse information and get people into doing something for the collective good without sometimes general understanding of it is worse.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  So a few men would decide this is the creator cause for what we're doing this.

• 35:18Trevor Noah?

  Oh damn.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  And then there'll be conscription. So you don't have to understand fully why we're doing this thing.

• 35:22Trevor Noah?

  Which is going.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  Make you do it. So while you're at this thing, you might discover, some people might make it. Some people might not, but you look at the ones that came back from wars and how many industries were built. It's always been an accelerant for technology, for ideas, for industries, for businesses, customizing cars, building technology, weapons, private jets. It's always because of something huge catastrophic that happened that included conscription.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  And I guess once you add a little bit of pessimism in there, you can find a lot of ideas when people push back. Because people just usually go with something. So I like, what I like with explainers is it always starts with, have you ever wondered why? But then you have to stick around to the end to go, what are you gonna do about it?

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  So that usually in our normal society, it's elections. You have to wait to choose, to almost feel like you have a choice because you've seen what happened in the last four years.

• 36:13Trevor Noah?

  Did you see, sorry, did you see that thing in, ah, I forget where this is in Canada. I think they, they, they, they, they had an election or they're planning to have one where everyone can just vote on their phones from home.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 36:27Trevor Noah?

  Like full on.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  We did an explainer about um digital voting, mobile voting.

• 36:31Trevor Noah?

  Um.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  Like full on.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Turns out it's extremely difficult from an encryption perspective.

• 36:36Trevor Noah?

  Wait, say more why.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  So, ah, this was a, a little while ago, so I don't wanna butcher this too much, but the question I went into the story with is why don't we all just vote on our phones?

• 36:46Trevor Noah?

  I love this, love this question.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Wouldn't it be great?

• 36:49Trevor Noah?

  It would be great.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  And wouldn't it make uh for a more participatory democracy?

• 36:52Trevor Noah?

  Sounds good to me.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  But I generally believe more people voting is good.

• 36:56Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Let's make it easier to vote.

• 36:58Trevor Noah?

  Love this, I'm in.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  And so I went and I talked.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  I'm not, I'm, I'm, I'm not a fan of, of total outright democracy, no.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Maybe we should start that. Well, it would still be a representative democracy. You would vote for the representatives.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  I'm like, some people don't deserve a voice.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Let's unpack that later.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  We should come back to that.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 37:23Trevor Noah?

  As you were.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  For the purpose of this conversation.

• 37:27Trevor Noah?

  Okay, okay. Shop, shop.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  So I went and I asked all of these encryption experts. And so we talked to folks that were working on mobile voting. We also talked to people that deeply oppose mobile voting. We should not do that. That's a really bad idea. And I wanted to understand why. My, what it boils down to is that voting is not like online banking. It is not like the secure things that you do online.

• 37:55Trevor Noah?

  And why is that?

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Couple of reasons. The first is that everything you do online accepts some level of fraud. Because the banks are basically backstopping a certain amount of fraud to make it easy for you to log in and do transactions and all those things. They accept that there will be some level of

• 38:12Trevor Noah?

  Acceptable risk.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  Of acceptable risk. And that level has to be below the friction that they would have to put

• 38:18Trevor Noah?

  Oh, wow.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  On you to make it less risky.

• 38:20Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  They just have to mean like more activity that makes them more money versus the amount of fraud that they have to pay for.

• 38:28Trevor Noah?

  Okay, so if I was to dumb this down for myself, it's the equivalent of like a clothing store going, we'll only put a certain amount of detectors on the clothing to make it safe.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Because you'll buy more.

• 38:43Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but we can't, we can't cover the thing in detectors because then you won't want to try it on. You won't see the thing. So we have to accept a certain amount of risk to have you

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 38:50Trevor Noah?

  Comfortable in the buying experience.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  And what items in the store are we putting detectors on?

• 38:53Trevor Noah?

  Ah, okay, got it.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Banks do this all the time.

• 38:55Trevor Noah?

  Okay, got it.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  We can't accept that in voting. Because the small amount of risk in, especially in the way that we vote in the United States with such small pockets where it matters a lot, you can't accept any amount of risk that way. And also philosophically, we don't believe that you should. The idea, if you try to explain to people that like, we're going to accept some voter fraud because more people can vote, like, not great.

• 39:17Trevor Noah?

  America's elections are basically like 50/50 at this point. So if you had like a 3%, 4%, that's not good. Oh, damn.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  So you can't accept, you can't accept that.

• 39:25Trevor Noah?

  She's fantastic. I'm in.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  This is a good, this is an explainable.

• 39:28Trevor Noah?

  This is fantastic.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  It would help more if we had the visuals. We could have a map. We could have like a, you know.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  We have your hand.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  I guess I do speak English the way that you.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  That was good.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  So, that's reason number one.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Reason number two is that it's just like nothing else on earth. When you have global powers that want to affect each other's outcomes. Like, we are not talking about stealing a million dollars, a hundred million dollars. We're talking about China and Russia and the United States trying to impact each other's elections. This is like, this is stakes like nothing else that exists at all. And so when you talk about that, like, the way that these encryption experts talk about mobile voting, it's like, the things that would have to withstand are like nothing you've ever experienced online. Like, there's nothing in the world that matters as much as the outcome of the elections of the most powerful countries.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  It makes absolute sense, because if you think of online versus physical voting, you are more susceptible to whims if you vote online than you would if you're voting physically.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Maybe that too. Maybe there's a change in the way that there's...

• 40:39Speaker 02

  Because you might be sitting on your couch feeling a certain way. And then... Then that might determine how you vote. But if you have to get up, take a day off, go queue...

• 40:47Speaker 01

  I think that would be an argument...

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Now I'm gonna vote worse.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, that would be an argument. I don't know.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  You just don't want me to stay at home. Why are you doing this to me? Also. Why are you doing this to me? Now when I get up, now when I go, I might change my vote on the way there, where I'm like, this is a terrible day.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  About the...

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Really? Terrible day. Not after you've... My man, have you seen the conversation that happens at queues when you're about to vote? That's another reason I don't want that, because now people are talking to each other about voting. Yes. Who should they talk to? Nobody.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  See, now we're having a good debate, because we're assuming it could work. We're talking about...

• 41:18Speaker 02

  I think anything that you're struggling for will make it worth it. So if you're standing in a queue in the snow, and you're about to make a decision around other people who took the same decision as you, to get out the...

• 41:28Speaker 01

  There is research. There is research on the fact that it's like a community builder. But that's a separate argument. That's a separate argument. I generally think of it like...

• 41:39Speaker 02

  Your makeup, your mind. Whose side are you on?

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Hold on, if you could...

• 41:41Speaker 02

  She's not on anybody's side. That's what makes her good. She's encouraging discourse, Eugene. Boo.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Okay, one more interesting thing about voting is also the ways that you would have these countries hack voting.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  I didn't really understand what I was talking about. I was thinking like in like a cyberpunk movie where you like see, you know, then there would be a glitch and someone in the US would notice the glitch and like there would be a hack, right? A lot of these encryption experts were like, listen, the way that they would do this is like, we already know that in districts, if it rains, it marginally affects voting.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  For the outcome of older people. And those people are more likely to vote this way. And then all of a sudden, because it rained, that one district that affects this one state that affects the electoral college that affects this, all of a sudden. And so what they would do, this gave me the heebie-jeebies when they said it. He was like, you could imagine a foreign power just digitally making it rain in just the right places, and we would never notice.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  Cloud seeding?

• 42:39Speaker 01

  And I was like, like, making it like,

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Did you say cloud seeding?

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Like digitally making it rain, like, like I'm making it, um, the lag time on the screen, they could make it a little bit longer. And that would mean that fewer people would vote, and you'd never notice. Or the, the login, maybe they would make it mess up a couple of times. And that would affect like older people in particular.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  Certainly, yeah.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  They just, it's just a little, little things on the edges, and then you'd have an outcome that you didn't expect.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  The politics would have very little to do with that.

• 43:02Trevor Noah?

  That's literally how I keep Eugene out of my house when I don't have to visit me. I'll just like, I'll make the lock a little tighter. I'll jam the door a little bit more.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  And he never, and he never, he hasn't noticed.

• 43:13Trevor Noah?

  And then some days, he just doesn't, I'll be like, yeah, come over anytime. And then he'll be there.

• 43:20Trevor Noah?

  But, but you know what?

• 43:21Speaker 02

  It makes so much sense.

• 43:21Trevor Noah?

  That is crazy to think about it like that, is like,

• 43:23Speaker 01

  So you go down, the way that we did this episode was you go down this rabbit hole, and you're like, okay, what are, these are all brilliant people that I'm talking to that have thought about this their whole lives, these are all the reasons why you wouldn't want it. I'm like, okay, but, but you could, right? Like, this isn't, I've talked to people who are building rockets, like, this isn't rocket science. Like, you, you could do this, right? Like, there's, there has to be someone, so I'm, I'm pushing, like, optimistically, like, this could work, right? And so then you get into the, the area of science, it's a little bit more boring, and I won't talk, tell you all about it, but like, how would they do it? What are the encryption strategies? There are people that are working on this that could do it in a way that you would notice the, the digital rain. They're like, there's, there's real effort here, and there are experiments, as you said, there are countries that are experimenting with it, there are places where they're trying

• 44:08Speaker 01

  to make this easier.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  And I think, I mean, the episode ends with, like, it's worth the effort to try. Like, here are all of the reasons why it's way harder than you think. Yeah. And it's not just like, oh, I bank online, I should vote online. But we believe that more people, voting is a good thing. You could be part of a future that allows that to happen. Like, here are all the smart people working on this hard problem. And so you don't end the story with, oh, it's way harder than you think. You end the story with, oh, here are all the smart solutions. It's ongoing. If you want to participate, you absolutely should.

• 44:40Trevor Noah?

  Don't go anywhere, because we've got more What Now? after this.

• 44:45Trevor Noah?

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• 45:30Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, one of my favorite YouTube Premium features is smart downloads. Because how many times have you gone somewhere and realized, ah, I forgot to download anything! And now you're on the way to the airport and you're like, download, download, download, download. You're on the plane, download, download, download, download. There's no Wi-Fi. I wish I downloaded! Now, all of those things that you were gonna watch are just on the internet. Smart downloads basically thinks ahead for you. It automatically downloads recommended videos based on what you like to watch. So even when you forget to prepare, YouTube Premium didn't. I love it. It's like packing for a trip and discovering somebody already remembered the thing you always leave at home. It's always the underwear. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Sign up now for your free trial at youtube.com/premium.

• 46:15Trevor Noah?

  Terms apply. Cancel anytime.

• 46:18Trevor Noah?

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• 47:03Trevor Noah?

  apple brown butter cookies, and chocolate bourbon pecan pie. And with no artificial sweeteners like sucralose, artificial colors like red dye number 40, or high-fructose corn syrup store-wide, nothing gets in the way of the flavors you came for. Shop fall flavors with higher standards at Whole Foods Markets. Earth can be a lot sometimes: heatwaves, gas prices, bad hair days. Why not go where life is good? Escape to Pluto TV. Turn off your problems and turn on your favorite movies and shows. You know, the ones you already love. From Anchorman, the Legend of Ron Burgundy, to Dirty Dancing, to Top Gun Maverick,

• 47:44Trevor Noah?

  from Alias to The X-Files, it's all here and all free. Go where the TV is always good: escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.

• 48:02Trevor Noah?

  You know what I just realized? You must be both the most fun and irritating person at a party.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  That's why she comes in early and li- uh comes in early and leaves early.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 48:14Trevor Noah?

  No, no, you know why? Because this is what I was thinking. People love, people love speaking to other people who know things. They love it. Until those people actually know things. That's what I've learned.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  No, but I don't know anything.

• 48:29Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, but you do. You see, you do. Because let's say we were at a party now. We're all standing around with our drinks, right? And we're all having this conversation. We're all, uh, yeah, yeah. So, so how do you know Eugene? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, yeah. Then I'm like, you know, the election, I think they should vote. So in Canada, they're gonna, they're gonna do the digital vote. Then you go like, oh, yeah, actually, they did, they did a thing on the. Then we're like, no, but the thing, and then you encryption, encryption, encryption, encryption, encryption. Facts, facts, facts, facts, facts, data, experts spoken to, et cetera. And then someone would be like, I'm gonna go, um, I'm gonna go get a.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  For us next.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  I, out of, context matters.

• 49:02Trevor Noah?

  I'm gonna go get another drink.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  In a party, I promise I know ish.

• 49:06Trevor Noah?

  No, I wouldn't. If I were you, I'd keep doing it. I'm just saying, because we live in a world where, let's be honest, we live in a world where what you said earlier really struck me. You said, I'm not an expert. I don't know anything. And I go, that's a strange level of humility for you to approach this, this sphere with because you do know things because you've learned on it from the experts. And I always go like, knowledge is, is from someone. You know what I mean? There's very few people who make original knowledge alone. Everyone takes from somewhere, takes from somewhere, takes from somewhere, the expert. And then when you read, even if you read those like textbooks, I love, you know, when you go down to the footnotes? And they're like, oh, yeah, this guy said that part and that person said, and she said that.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  And that guy heard it from the Anunnaki.

• 49:46Trevor Noah?

  And that person, and then, from who?

• 49:50Trevor Noah?

  You're always taking me into weird words.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  Highly intelligent extraterrestrial beings called the Anunnaki.

• 49:55Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I don't even know what that is.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, anyway.

• 49:57Trevor Noah?

  Oh, wait, let's talk about aliens, actually. Eugene is a huge fan of aliens.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  I am also.

• 50:02Trevor Noah?

  Have you, have you discovered anything?

• 50:06Speaker 02

  Apparently, we're close to making first contact in the next two years or so.

• 50:08Trevor Noah?

  You see, I love it. Now we're at the party. He's just said that.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's a guy called.

• 50:13Trevor Noah?

  First, have your drink and say it. I think it, it sets the scene.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  We're at a party.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  Hey, yeah, um.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  So aliens.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  So there's an extraterrestrial, uh, being that comes to a guy called Daryl Anker.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  Do you just hate it when your pessimistic friend is a DJ?

• 50:43Speaker 01

  We shouldn't have put him in charge of the music.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  You were saying.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  Do you think I encouraged him to start mixing?

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Now, look at me.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  So, there's this being that comes through him. It's been doing this for the last twenty, thirty years. It's called Pasha. So, Pasha, a couple of years ago.

• 51:08Trevor Noah?

  Are you ready for a Eugene explainer, by the way?

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Wait, I'm sorry. Are we talking about like?

• 51:11Speaker 02

  Daryl Anka?

• 51:12Speaker 01

  The real world?

• 51:13Speaker 02

  He channels Pasha.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Are we talking about?

• 51:15Speaker 02

  His seminar.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  Guys, am I the only one who knows about Pasha and Spirit Box at the same time?

• 51:21Trevor Noah?

  So, explain the Eugene, please. Okay, so this is, this is one of Eugene's favorite YouTube channels.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Is this like a, like?

• 51:27Speaker 02

  Spirit Box and Pasha are two different things. But we'll go into Spirit Box later.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  And are they, is this like?

• 51:34Speaker 01

  I'll ask, I'll ask this the way that my five-year-old niece would ask this. Like, is this the pretend world or is this the real world? Okay.

• 51:40Speaker 02

  But with some level of pretend in it.

• 51:41Trevor Noah?

  I'm gonna pull this up in the meantime, while he describes it, then I'm gonna play it for you.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  So, Pasha has been, I mean, I mean, Daryl Anka has been channeling this being from another planet psychically called Pasha, right? So, Daryl does this. And then Pasha, five years ago, predicted that in the next coming years, we're gonna start seeing things that we can't explain in the sky. So, those are different levels of aliens that will start making contact. And then, two years ago, a year ago, we started seeing drones that people couldn't explain, governments couldn't explain, phenomena that was happening globally at the same time that people couldn't explain. And then he said, two years from now, we're gonna start seeing more contact, human contact, with aliens. And I believe it.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  I was gonna go a different route with this.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  Tell me.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  But.

• 52:24Trevor Noah?

  Wait, wait, before you do, I'll, I'll play you, I'll play you, this is a guest, JonBenet Ramsey Spirit Box.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  I'm pretty sure when we were talking about.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  No, Spirit Box and, and Pasha, so start with Pasha, Spirit Box is something else.

• 52:36Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I don't, I don't know.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  Okay, start with.

• 52:38Trevor Noah?

  I only remember Spirit Box because it like made my life.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  Say Pasha.

• 52:41Trevor Noah?

  Okay, hold on, hold on.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  But then you let.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Are we sure we should be giving this more? Airtime, Trevor.

• 52:47Trevor Noah?

  We can just, we can just, we can just bleep them all.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  Remember when you worried about your, your, your digital diet?

• 52:54Trevor Noah?

  But actually, wait, wait, no. So now, let me, let me ask you, as, as somebody who loves science, who explores, who go, how do you delve into a topic like this? This is a good moment. So let's say we were in the office now, Eugene had just pitched you.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Well, we did this for, um.

• 53:07Trevor Noah?

  Cause it's huge if it's true.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  It is huge.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  The show is called Huge If True.

• 53:12Trevor Noah?

  If somebody can speak across like dimensions to aliens and.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  And also, I mean, I think the thing that I really like to do when I hear things that, with all due respect, may or may not be true.

• 53:22Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Is, uh, you take that and you say, okay, what are people interested in here? And how can I show you the way in which the science that I'm confident is, is at least going through the scientific process is, um, more interesting for the reasons you are interested in this than a sort of fictional world ever could be. So for example, people are really interested in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. There are a lot of conspiracy theories about it.

• 53:49Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  The real Large Hadron.

• 53:51Trevor Noah?

  Wait, what are the conspiracy theories?

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Oh, they think it's like gonna tear a hole in the universe. They think it's, there's a lot of like.

• 53:56Trevor Noah?

  It'll create a black hole.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Devil worship kind of thing.

• 53:58Trevor Noah?

  Sucks everything.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, the sort of pseudo-scientific, but also like much more spiritual as well, that this is wrong somehow, that we shouldn't be playing God. There's like a lot of like centralizing.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  Stargate kind of stuff, opening a portal for things to come in.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like all of that. Um, also, like, there have been a couple of instances in which, like, people have played into this, like, there were a couple of students who pulled a prank where they were, like, dressed up a certain way and, like, did a sort of chanting.

• 54:21Trevor Noah?

  Oh, man.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  And that wasn't, that wasn't ideal, but it got a lot of headlines.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  I'm deep into conspiracy, so whenever, whenever we're close to something.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Those were a bunch of, like, PhD students or something.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  And then a bunch of PhD, PhD students play a prank and that prank, prank becomes more famous than the original conspiracy and then it rubs out that conspiracy. I think those are agent provocateurs.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Maybe, I don't know. I have no idea.

• 54:42Trevor Noah?

  You'd like this, actually, you, you might appreciate this. I, I remember having a conversation with someone who was pretty high up, used to be at the CIA. And I said to him, I was like, yo. Conspiracy theories, like are these people real or they on to something? And he said something that'll stick with me forever. He said, at the CIA, we laugh at conspiracy theorists and all that. But he said, but we're also glad that they are as crazy as they are because of how many times they are right.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 55:10Trevor Noah?

  And can I tell you, that changed my perspective. Cause I'm, he's a conspiracy theorist, I'm not, like I'm genuinely not. But it changed my perspective forever because I was like, oh, we assume a conspiracy theorist is always wrong.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:24Trevor Noah?

  We assume they're always wrong.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 55:26Trevor Noah?

  And then what he basically said to me was, no, no, no, sometimes they're right. But the stuff that they're wrong on is so often and so crazy that it covers the things that they did get. And then we just get to, that's why they'll never like confirm nor deny anything. Because it just, it stacks on itself.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  And I think in the last couple of years, they've tried to do, to dispel the myth that most CIA agents are white. And also that what they're doing is unethical. Cause you've seen there's a, there was a huge, there was this one guy who was famous with an Afro. Um, who used to be on all podcasts and you'll be talking about.

• 56:01Trevor Noah?

  I've seen that guy.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Guys, really, do you think, do you really, I'm here, they hired me with an Afro and I'm black? Do you really think they're that bad? Then everyone was like, yeah, are they that bad? But people who've been affected by spies and CIA agents and people who've done things were like, they didn't look like you.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  So there is always, like, I certainly believe when there's protests, when there's, um.

• 56:22Trevor Noah?

  Oh, but that's been proved.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  There's always been an agent provocateur who's just, person credible enough to dispel what is really going on, right?

• 56:28Trevor Noah?

  But that's been proved.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  I mean, I think there's, there's a lot to weed out and like.

• 56:34Trevor Noah?

  This is how it starts.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  I'm not, I'm not.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  Okay, shut, shut. That's all I needed. Eye contact and a denial.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  I'm not.

• 56:39Trevor Noah?

  Eugene's easy to, to please. Are you a spy?

• 56:43Speaker 02

  No.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  What's interesting to me though.

• 56:45Trevor Noah?

  We're good, we're good, we're good.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  I try and think about it, like, what is the core interest here? Like, so for example, I, um, I love the idea that I might be alive when we make first contact. Like the idea that there are aliens out there, especially intelligent aliens.

• 57:02Speaker 02

  I'm taking supplements for that reason.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  You wanna be alive for longer to be.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  Not for my daughter to graduate university.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  To see when we meet, yeah, totally. Or even, I mean, I would be.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  Lion's mane, I'm in.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  I would be excited about like bacteria on another planet.

• 57:18Trevor Noah?

  I'm sorry, just sorry.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  I'm so sorry.

• 57:20Trevor Noah?

  I'm so sorry.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  Theo, I'm really sorry.

• 57:22Trevor Noah?

  This guy just said, wait, I'm sorry. This man just said, that's what I'm thinking. Because now I pictured the aliens coming down to Earth, making first contact with you specifically, going back to the mothership. And then they go like, have you met them? It's like, yes, I've made contact full of magnesium and high levels of lion's mane mushrooms. Is this all of, yes, I think they are 50% mushroom and 50% human. Are you sure? I'm pretty sure. I scanned him, I'm pretty sure.

• 57:54Speaker 02

  And why is his pee orange?

• 57:55Trevor Noah?

  He had ashwagandha, a lot of ashwagandha in these species. I'm sorry. Sorry, so you were going.

• 58:04Speaker 02

  You thought I was bad, look!

• 58:05Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no. He said I take supplements hoping for that day. We never think of which, do you know how important it is?

• 58:13Speaker 01

  I just nodded and smiled.

• 58:14Trevor Noah?

  Yes, but do you know how important it is to think about which human will be our first contact? We never think about that. Because if the aliens do get here and then they meet, who they meet first.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Oh, but I think they're gonna be like, looking at us from afar and seeing that there's nitrogen in our atmosphere.

• 58:30Trevor Noah?

  You think they're gonna David Attenborough us?

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't think they're gonna.

• 58:32Trevor Noah?

  They have been, what do you mean they are going to? They have been.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  I think there's so many, well, okay, so to get back to conspiracy theories, I promise. The thing that I am most interested in is what people are interested in. So for example, the idea that people, we as humans feel this kind of loneliness like with each other and also cosmically that I think is really beautiful somehow. Like, we're so used to reaching out to each other that we understand that the world is big, the universe is unthinkable enormous and we reach out and we really want that. And so I think that is beautiful and interesting. And when I tell stories, I want to make a video. I just made an episode all about what would happen if an asteroid were about to hit Earth and how we would figure out how to solve that problem.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  There are real solutions to that, which are fascinating. But I want to do another version of that where I imagine, like, what is the most realistic case where we might encounter aliens? Is it that on the moons of Europa, we're gonna, is it that on Europa, we're gonna find, you know, bacteria in an ocean somewhere? Is it that we're gonna look at a? Star system, you know, hundreds of light years away and see that there's a an atmosphere there that we think looks like ours because it has life. Like, what would the realistic scenarios be? And then you create a sort of, I'm really into the idea right now of mixing science fiction with the explainer stories that we're doing. Because I do think that science fiction, if you are very clear, again with the voicing with Mark Rober, if you're very clear about what's fiction and what's fact,

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  you can play out a situation. An asteroid is coming for Earth. Okay, now what are the real, what is the real science and technology that we would use in that situation? So in this case, okay, imagine the realistic scenarios in which we might actually encounter life in, off Earth. What would happen next? What would we do if we encountered some, you know, light? How would we verify that? Will we send a probe? It's gonna take a hundred years to get there if it's a hundred, it's gonna take much, much more than that, actually. How would we verify that? And so you, you play this out and you, you accept what people find interesting and what the seed is. And then you try and show them the science and the technology that you're convinced is real through the scientific method, but that gets at this, this thing that they are excited about.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  So another example is-

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  It's the same as the 1902 article.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, you try and, you try and do that in, in an optimistic way so people can see like, okay, if the plane were to fly, what would that mean? Okay, if we were to find aliens, what would that, what would that look like? What is the real science and tech there? Same thing, I guess what I'm doing is sort of sci-fi every time.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  You are the 1902 first article.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  It was 1903 or 1902.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  1903 for the, for the, yeah.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  Right Brothers was 1903?

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Pretty sure, yeah.

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  Okay, 1903, yeah.

• 1:01:16Trevor Noah?

  I don't know. I'm just, I'm just making sure I remember it correctly.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  And so you can do that over and over again with all of these different, these different interests. I don't even want to call them conspiracy theories. It's just like, okay, you're interested in CERN, you're interested in the fact that we're smashing particles together. Let me tell you the real science and tech.

• 1:01:33Speaker 02

  No, can I tell you?

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, smashing protons. The real thing that we're doing underground.

• 1:01:38Trevor Noah?

  Particle smashing. Hey, you.

• 1:01:41Trevor Noah?

  Only Eugene could make science sexy.

• 1:01:44Speaker 02

  I ain't nah.

• 1:01:45Trevor Noah?

  You see those particles smashing?

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  I was thinking more combative, but.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  Now I get it.

• 1:01:48Trevor Noah?

  What did the one Hadron Collider say to the other Hadron Collider? So, did you smash? Hey. There's a scientist out there who's loving that. He's like, yeah.

• 1:02:00Trevor Noah?

  I just realized you, that's a superpower that you have.

• 1:02:05Trevor Noah?

  That is not just in short supply. I can't think of many people I've met who have this ability. You spend very little to no time focusing on

• 1:02:19Trevor Noah?

  the definitive place that people find their imaginations at.

• 1:02:24Trevor Noah?

  And instead, you encourage the possibilities of where that imagination could lead. So like, you just did it now, right? Eugene goes, I believe the aliens and they speak like this and they're doing this. I'm going like, I don't believe in this. I believe it's pop, but I don't believe in this. And we're all like that, we're friends. And I always say, what I love about that is like, I don't think people have enough friendships where their friend has a thing, like Eugene treats my views on soccer like I treat his views on aliens. Do you know what I mean? So when I'm like, ah, that game, he's like, what game? There was no, this is all not, you know what I mean? But we have fun with it, we genuinely do. But what you do is more interesting is like, you don't sit in the, is it right? Is it wrong? Is it real? Is it not? Is it no? You go, huh, how would we? What would we?

• 1:03:09Trevor Noah?

  Where would we? It like encourages this journey, it encourages a journey.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:15Trevor Noah?

  For everyone involved, do you know what I mean?

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Well, the energy is there, the desire to learn, the desire.

• 1:03:20Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but I think most people.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  The desire to do research.

• 1:03:22Trevor Noah?

  But I think most people don't treat people like that, like.

• 1:03:26Trevor Noah?

  I tried to explain this to somebody once. I genuinely did not have the eloquence nor the compassion that I think you have when engaging in the topics. But I remember saying this around like parents with vaccines, you know? And I remember, I think on one of our episodes, we talked to maybe Dr. Becky about it and I was saying.

• 1:03:44Trevor Noah?

  A lot of parents are anti-vaccine, right? And we live in a world now, for the most part, where people go pro, anti, fight. How can you not? How can you? And that's it. It's as simple as that. And there's very few people who will take a moment to go, well, somebody who is anti-vaccine has actually spent a lot of time on their own Googling and reading. That's almost why they've become anti-vaccine, is because they've gone out of their way to consume copious amounts of information that have led them down a certain path. Now, whether the information is valid or not is a separate discussion, but it means that they have a hunger and they have an interest in the topic that has now brought them to that place.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  Can you offer more research?

• 1:04:24Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, can you offer anything?

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  That allows them to do that thing that they do in a direction that has more for them to do it, too. There's more information over here. You could be more excited about all of the many different research papers that are coming out every day. Like, here's a place to start. Like, here's some interesting information. And I also think, like, the thing that gets me really excited is that the world is very strange and very exciting and full of things to learn and to get excited about. And so I view my job as to create a menu of journalistically rigorous, genuinely beautiful,

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  deep explainers that might excite someone to go down all of these different paths.

• 1:05:12Trevor Noah?

  Have any of them been wrong in any way?

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  I mean, we issue corrections when we get things wrong. There haven't been any major stories where the underlying point of the story has been wrong. And we work really, really hard to make sure that that's not the case. If it ever is, we would do a big correction on that. So far, it hasn't happened. But every once in a while, we'll need to do a correction on a fact. So YouTube has a really great UX where you can put the time code and then a colon and put correction.

• 1:05:42Trevor Noah?

  UX is user experience?

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  Experience, okay. So there's a feature on YouTube where you can say the time code and then say correction and put whatever you want people to understand that is different than the fact that you said. So I do this sometimes if I say, like, if I, an example would be, I use the wrong, we do everything in metric, but I have an American audience as well. So if a...

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Translation is incorrect.

• 1:06:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  I would put the correct one or something like things that are sometimes they're they're more deep than that. We had a cave that we said was in one country, but it's actually in another. You put the correction. And this is, I mean, this is a basic journalistic practice. This is what you want, you know, if you're telling a story.

• 1:06:22Trevor Noah?

  You say that, but I mean, you say that, but we live in a world where

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  This is our journalistic practice.

• 1:06:27Trevor Noah?

  That isn't a why? Why journalism, by the way? I mean, if if both parents were in law, why? Why did you pick journalism?

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  Well, I began working at Vox on the business side, actually.

• 1:06:37Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  I was really excited. I had no experience as a journalist and I was really excited about the idea that I could help facilitate the storytelling that I was so excited about.

• 1:06:47Trevor Noah?

  Sorry to interrupt you there. Like, are you ever not excited? No, you you like you strike me as a very positive, optimistic, excited. Like, I understand making videos about asteroids hitting the earth and like explaining the world. Excited. I'm with you completely. Law, death penalty, excited. You just said, I was gonna go work in the business division, business affairs, and I was excited. And your eyes told me that you

• 1:07:12Speaker 02

  Looked excited.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:14Trevor Noah?

  Is there anything where you go like, like boring? Like, is there anything or have you always had this as a as a as a filter on the world?

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  I think I was so incredibly lucky that somehow. I don't think it's innate. I think I was taught this somehow along the way that there's nothing. I'm actually, I'm doing an episode right now. I'll spoil it. When does when does this come out?

• 1:07:36Trevor Noah?

  Well, whenever it needs to come out.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  Um, I don't know. This is not the kind of thing that is like a big spoiler. We're working on an episode for the Olympics. It'll come out during the Olympics.

• 1:07:44Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  And we're focusing on curling, the

• 1:07:47Speaker 02

  A sport?

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  The sport.

• 1:07:49Trevor Noah?

  Ah.

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  Big wheel of cheese.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  I'm obsessed with curling. I think curling is just the most fast. From a physics perspective, the ice is amazing. There are all kinds of applications of the way that it's the curling stone spins that might in an interesting way help us solve physics problems.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  You guys criticize me.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  No, I promise.

• 1:08:07Trevor Noah?

  Ah, Eugene.

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  You're talking about a granite

• 1:08:08Trevor Noah?

  Eugene.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  Wheel of cheese.

• 1:08:11Trevor Noah?

  Eugene.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:12Trevor Noah?

  Let's be clear. I've never criticized you. I've only mocked you. There's a difference.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  I is where in the UX can I put this correction?

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  You want some?

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:27Trevor Noah?

  So yes, you're fascinated by curling. And you said how it might help us solve?

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  So the physics, there's a physics mystery in curling, which is, oh, man. I gotta explain this now. So.

• 1:08:39Trevor Noah?

  Are we that bad? This is your life.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no, no. This is a thing that nobody would understand.

• 1:08:44Trevor Noah?

  No, throw it.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  Hold on, I'll explain this one second. I need a, I need a prop.

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  You need a sip? Yes.

• 1:08:48Trevor Noah?

  Okay. No, she needs a prop. She's gonna.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  Oh, a prop? So you, okay.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  You're the life of the party.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  That would be really fun if we were.

• 1:08:55Trevor Noah?

  If we had a party now, you'd be like, alright.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  Okay, so the mystery in curling is usually if I have this and I spin it.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  I don't know if you saw that, but I was spinning it in this direction.

• 1:09:10Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  And it moved that way.

• 1:09:11Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  Does that make sense?

• 1:09:12Speaker 02

  So it counters the head?

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  Yes. In curling, that's not what happens. I can't demonstrate it with this right now, but if you're, if you're with a curling stone, which has a very specific like bottom, and you, you spin it on the ice. If you watch Olympic curling, it will spin this direction, right? That's the same as what I spin. And it will move this way. And that has been confusing physicists for a hundred years.

• 1:09:36Trevor Noah?

  Why, why is the other one normally happening? Is it centrifugal force? What is happening?

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  Something about, so the reason why, the reason why that happens. So I spun that way, it moved that way. I think I did it a little bit. Let's see if I can do it going straight, really trying to make it work. Yeah, so it moved that way, I spun it that way.

• 1:09:52Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  The reason why that happens is something to do with friction on the front. And it, like, I, I don't totally understand why it happens, but it basically happens with everything.

• 1:10:02Trevor Noah?

  Got it, got it.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  So if you, the physics of this spin and the friction of forward motion means that it should move that way. But on ice with a curling stone, it goes. It goes the opposite direction than you would expect.

• 1:10:17Trevor Noah?

  Because there's no friction?

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  So we don't totally understand why. So this has been confusing physicists. There are a lot of genuine research papers written about this. This has been confusing physicists for like 100 years. And there's a lot of very reasonable. If you ask why and you look at the papers, there are a bunch of reasons that they give. There's one theory that has to do with the friction on the front of a curling stone is different than if it's on this because the ice is melting slightly as the friction moves across. So there's something to change about the friction.

• 1:10:47Trevor Noah?

  Like is it that the water and the ice are like doing two opposite things?

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  There are a couple of different theories.

• 1:10:51Trevor Noah?

  Between them or?

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  I couldn't repeat you.

• 1:10:54Trevor Noah?

  You just tricked me into being interested in curling.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  I know, I know.

• 1:10:56Trevor Noah?

  Look at me.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  So, so this is my point.

• 1:10:57Trevor Noah?

  Watching the Olympics, watching curling, trying to figure out why the stone spins the way it does.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  This is exactly my point.

• 1:11:03Trevor Noah?

  And what material is this stone? Granite?

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  Really special granite. It comes from one island. Every single Olympic curling stone comes from the same island.

• 1:11:11Trevor Noah?

  What island?

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  It's called.

• 1:11:14Trevor Noah?

  You can just say any island and we'll throw in a correction. We should just do that for fun, just to show people how it works.

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  So the specific island where the.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  It's called.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  I'm not going to remember this. I'm not going to imagine.

• 1:11:25Trevor Noah?

  Just say an island. Just say an island. The island of stone.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  Stone. Alyssa Craig, thank you so much.

• 1:11:35Trevor Noah?

  The sober guy at the party.

• 1:11:38Trevor Noah?

  I'm a facts man.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  But see, every single stone comes from that one island. Okay, here's my point.

• 1:11:45Trevor Noah?

  And every single boring person comes from that island too. Thanks for the facts, facts guy. We were having so much fun here guessing.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  They were going to make me make up an island, so thank you. Um, here's my point with this.

• 1:12:00Trevor Noah?

  The island of Bashar. And then we would have put the correction. See, it would have been perfect. Sorry, Eugene, sorry.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  My point is that curling is a sport where if you read the YouTube comments and most videos about curling, or if you look at the way that people cover curling, especially on television during the Olympics. They make a lot of fun of it. They, they, they talk a lot about like, how did this become an Olympic sport? Like, oh, you know, why are we like, it's, it's sort of a joke. It becomes a joke. First, I think curling is amazing and I think the curling athletes are amazing. So I, I think that shouldn't be the case in the first place.

• 1:12:32Trevor Noah?

  Athletes?

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, oh, I tried curling at the curling Olympic trials. I tried it. It's insanely hard.

• 1:12:38Trevor Noah?

  Wait, what makes it hard? What's hard about it? Knowing that your friends might see you doing it?

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  No, the balance of doing it.

• 1:12:44Trevor Noah?

  I mean, you know, you know, we started this, we are, man. You know, we started this, we are, man. Come on, baby. Come on, baby. Man, you're not, you're not.

• 1:12:52Speaker 02

  I'm so jealous of that line.

• 1:12:53Trevor Noah?

  Come on, you, you know, we started this, we are, baby.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  I've never heard you use that voice before.

• 1:12:59Trevor Noah?

  Don't be out here acting like you know that we started curling, we are.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  This is my point, you guys, which is.

• 1:13:07Trevor Noah?

  Kyo are trying to trick us into acting like curling is not funny. Some people think it's funny. We are those people. You don't have to go far. There are some people who think it's a, we are those people. You have found us.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  I am gonna make the case for this. I am such a big curling fan. I am gonna make this case. My point.

• 1:13:26Trevor Noah?

  Okay, sorry, sorry.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  My point is that it is lame to be the cynic who looks at curling and thinks, oh, it's funny. It's not interesting. Not to you guys, but it's lame. It is much, it is much more interesting and it makes your life better to be the person that goes, why does it work that way?

• 1:13:48Trevor Noah?

  Got you.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  Why is that? Turns out there's a crazy physics mystery and, and a stone island and a relationship to how we're gonna discover aliens, by the way, because we need to understand, we don't need to understand physics of curling, but it relates to the way in which we're gonna explore islands where, or it relates to the way that we're gonna explore planets with ice and oceans underneath. So we need, there, there's a whole physics of the way that ice rubs against other things and you need to understand that if you're gonna drill into planet. It's just, my point is that there's an endless amount of interesting things to know when you don't stop at, oh, that looks a little funny.

• 1:14:30Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  There's a, there, or it's boring.

• 1:14:32Trevor Noah?

  You just made me, but you also just made me realize that comedy does the exact opposite of what you're saying. But it's all about assumption.

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:41Trevor Noah?

  You know what I mean?

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  I would actually say that your comedy makes me think more about the everyday things.

• 1:14:46Trevor Noah?

  You're very, you're very kind, but I think like when I think of like most, if you, if you think of some of the crazier jokes that we'll tell as comedians. Fundamentally, what we're doing is, the seed is the same. It, it, it's all, it's all born in curiosity and being inquisitive. However, the conclusion is necessary, like the, the assumption of the conclusion is necessary. Otherwise, it isn't. One of the first ones where, where I knew this was Jerry Seinfeld. One of his, his most famous jokes was about expiration dates on milk. And he was like, how do they know? How do they know when you milk the cow? It's like, you know, they've got the date and it's like, and he had this really amazing bits about like, he's like, are they milking the cow? And the, and then the farmer leans in and then the cow's like, yo, yo, January 7th. You know what I mean? Very funny bits. I never, I never laughed at it, never found it funny.

• 1:15:31Trevor Noah?

  Because I knew before I saw the joke, how they have the expiry date and it's just a number of days after it comes out of the cow. And so I learned in that moment that a lot of comedy relies on you not knowing.

• 1:15:43Speaker 02

  The facts, yeah.

• 1:15:44Trevor Noah?

  Being curious, but don't pull out a phone. Don't, don't do the research. Don't just be like, how do they? And then you've got to go on your own journey and figure it out. And God forbid you figure out the truth. It's just like.

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  The joke is finished.

• 1:15:58Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, the joke just like, it like.

• 1:16:00Speaker 02

  Such a CIA thing to say.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. I think a lot of what you've been doing with your comedy is like, you do explain. Like you land, you land an explainer after a funny journey.

• 1:16:14Trevor Noah?

  If it's, if it's a real story, I mean, you and I are similar in that way. If it's like a real thing, I'm not going to try and make it not a, but there are moments where you go.

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:22Trevor Noah?

  What is the, like, one of my favorite jokes of myself, you know, every comedian has their own favorites, is one of mine was like the origins of the Ku Klux Klan. And I was like, where did they get the name, the KKK?

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:34Trevor Noah?

  Right? Because then I looked into it, then it's like, it was, the joke was something about like how the origins were, they, they got it from the Greek Brotherhood. It was Kuklos Alfion was the original name. All right, Kuklos Alfion, Kuklos Clan is how they got the name, Kuklos Clan.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:48Trevor Noah?

  Right? But then I was like, but then it's, it's not, it's not Kuklax Clan, it's not supposed to be KKK. It was supposed to be like.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  KKK.

• 1:16:55Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, it was supposed to be like KKC, and then it was supposed to be a whole thing. And then I played with it, played, and I took you down the origins of it, but it was crazy stuff. And then I ended up on KFC. And I was like, that's the original, that's supposed to be the name of the, of the KKK is the KFC, but then they, they were like, we can't do that. Then I was like, cause black people would love them. And then.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  Who told you they couldn't do it?

• 1:17:15Speaker 02

  I thought you were gonna say, who told them black people love them? You, you were so close. You were so close.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  That's why I'm not a comic.

• 1:17:27Trevor Noah?

  And then I ended it by saying, but I guess everyone wins because I'm sure the KFC has been responsible for the deaths of way more black people than the KKK.

• 1:17:36Speaker 02

  My man, we're trying to get sponsors on this thing. Aren't you tired of struggling?

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  Aren't you tired?

• 1:17:49Speaker 02

  Oh, man. We're walking home after this, thanks to you.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 1:17:58Trevor Noah?

  I'm gonna go get another drink.

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

  She doesn't even have water. You see what happens with no fighting.

• 1:18:02Trevor Noah?

  Actually, I need more. Can we, can I get water for? She chugged it.

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  For the sake of science.

• 1:18:06Trevor Noah?

  She chugged it for the sake of science to show us something.

• 1:18:10Trevor Noah?

  Oh, it's, it's right behind you, in the Credenza. It's in the Credenza.

• 1:18:13Speaker 02

  It's called a Credenza?

• 1:18:15Trevor Noah?

  In the Credenza.

• 1:18:16Speaker 02

  And the Cordenza is something else.

• 1:18:17Trevor Noah?

  My uncle used to drive a Credenza.

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you so, thank you.

• 1:18:22Trevor Noah?

  No, thank you, I'm fine, thank you. You need all of it.

• 1:18:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:24Trevor Noah?

  All of it. No, no, no, but.

• 1:18:26Speaker 02

  Like how Cleo put the water on turbo, she was like, hey!

• 1:18:31Trevor Noah?

  No, so I, like, but, but I think the, the, look, the, the seed of it in the essence is fundamentally the same, and that is.

• 1:18:39Trevor Noah?

  Curiosity. Once we stop being curious, we stop growing. Like, we stagnate, we don't, we don't try and make the plane. We don't try and make the rocket ship. We don't try and make the Hadron Collider. We don't try and make the internet. We don't try. All of that requires curiosity, you know what I mean? And, and I've always, I'm, I know I've said this to you before, but I go, people forget that the only way you can invent something is to imagine it first.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:01Trevor Noah?

  But it can't exist.

• 1:19:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:03Trevor Noah?

  You, you don't mean, you have to imagine it.

• 1:19:05Speaker 02

  If it exists, it's someone's imagination.

• 1:19:07Trevor Noah?

  Yeah. Someone just went like, imagine if, and then now we treat that as like a helicopter. We just treat as a normal thing. Of course a helicopter works. Yo, helicopter, have you explained helicopters? Cause those things are crazy.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  It's actually incredibly difficult to explain.

• 1:19:20Trevor Noah?

  Those things are, those things should not be flying.

• 1:19:22Speaker 01

  Very, very hard.

• 1:19:23Trevor Noah?

  Those things should not be in the air.

• 1:19:24Speaker 02

  Da Vinci draw the first helicopter?

• 1:19:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but even his was more normal.

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:28Trevor Noah?

  His one was better.

• 1:19:28Speaker 02

  I might be wrong.

• 1:19:29Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, it was that, it was that, it had that spirally thing. His one was better than what they, yeah, what they made today.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  This is so fun. Like, this is what we're trying to do. With all the things that will come next. That too.

• 1:19:42Trevor Noah?

  Have you, wait, wait, have you explained? So are there any things you've tried to explain or gone into that has left you with more questions than answers?

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  Oh, most things, I think. Yeah, because, because imagine, so you start out with something and you're like,

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  take the CERN episode, for example. So you start out and you are curious about why there is a seventeen mile loop underground.

• 1:20:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  In Switzerland and France. And it runs underneath all of these farms and houses. And it's just this like massive tube with a vacuum in it. And down the tube, they're firing protons in opposite directions. And then when the protons are going nearly at the speed of light, they smash them together in one of these massive detectors. Like, why are they doing that? Why did they choose to build that? Why are they doing it there? Why are they, why?

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  I don't know. Okay, maybe.

• 1:20:34Speaker 02

  Okay. Okay, until someone comes up with a.

• 1:20:39Trevor Noah?

  With a better catalyst.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  I think it was just international collaboration.

• 1:20:42Trevor Noah?

  I killed someone.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  I don't know. I genuinely don't know. And so you have all these questions. And so you begin to answer them. You ask, for example, why do we want to smash protons together? And it's like, well, the energies that you can get create different kinds of particles that we think were around at the beginning of the universe. So it's teaching us things about the beginning of the universe. It is also proving the existence.

• 1:21:04Trevor Noah?

  Just to confirm, is it the beginning of like our universe or all universes? Which I never, no, I've never known.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  I don't know that much about.

• 1:21:12Trevor Noah?

  Cause it's our.

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  Multi-universe theory.

• 1:21:15Speaker 02

  I think it's the universe in totality, yeah.

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  I think it's.

• 1:21:17Trevor Noah?

  But I'm saying, are they, because I don't know. I only thought of this now while you were saying it. I was like.

• 1:21:22Speaker 02

  Cause Tina.

• 1:21:23Trevor Noah?

  There's more, there's more universe, right?

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  I think the question you're asking is, is the theory about multiverses, do they all begin at the big bang?

• 1:21:29Trevor Noah?

  That's what I'm asking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm saying, is it all universes or just our universe?

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  All.

• 1:21:34Trevor Noah?

  All universes from one big bang?

• 1:21:35Speaker 02

  One big bang.

• 1:21:36Trevor Noah?

  Huh.

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  I mean, he said it with such confidence.

• 1:21:38Trevor Noah?

  He really did. And this is how he wins all our arguments. Cause now I'm, I, he beat me.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  I genuinely don't know. Maybe.

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's about all universe. Cause you must remember up until recently, we thought the universe was our planet.

• 1:21:51Trevor Noah?

  Yes, that's true.

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  That's what we thought, right? But you can see in pop culture starting to pop up the theory of quantum jumping, the theory of the multiverse, and they're all interlinked. Cause you look at a popular movies that show Doctor Strange going from one port to the other. You like they're explaining that, but the theory of whatever you're going through now, there's another version of you that didn't choose to do the thing that you're doing now.

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, this is a really good episode idea. I haven't done much on like multiverses. I'm gonna write this down after this.

• 1:22:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a really good story.

• 1:22:19Speaker 02

  So I think when, when.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  There's a, there's a very serious physics. Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  People like observing photons and atoms because there's this theory that if you're observing it, it changes. But if you're not looking at it, but it's like mostly with anything. But you think of yourself in your apartment or your house. If you're in the living room, you don't know what's going on in the bedroom. But somehow your curiosity, because we always think of curiosity as grandiose. Something has to be invented and you have to have some show for it. But it sometimes happens to you when you're sitting in your living room and you go. I wonder what's going on in the bedroom. And you meander in there and then you go. Everything as I left it, then you go back to where you're from. So I think answering those questions of why there's an a loop underground smashing protons. There's a few guys who are really interested in finding out why. But the impacts of it will reverberate towards everything that we're doing currently.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:23:09Speaker 02

  And when I It's like a cellphone signal. We didn't care until we cared.

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  And when I look into those stories and I I wonder, why did a couple hundred scientists build something like this? What what is the purpose?

• 1:23:19Speaker 02

  No girlfriends.

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  And then why do they?

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  There's some there. This is what scientists do.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  And then why do they want to build a bigger one?

• 1:23:27Speaker 02

  Won't stop you. You're gonna wear white a white coat and do what? No, we're going to Switzerland. There's a loop. And then then there's a torch. My other friend is gonna be firing the torch from. And then. And then.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  But like, here's a question.

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  No science.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  Here's a question that I had when I was going into this story. How do they make them hit each other?

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, that one that one blew my mind.

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  Make them hit each other?

• 1:23:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  That's it. That's a good one. So then you you keep going and every question begets like ten more questions.

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  And everyone, it's like a fractal says, oh, out and out and out.

• 1:24:01Trevor Noah?

  But you know what's funny is most people who do this become pessimistic.

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:24:05Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I I find most people or many people who go whatever, but but but then but then they then then they go into like a spiral of but then but then nothing.

• 1:24:17Speaker 02

  No, they go piss. They they start up. They they start off curious.

• 1:24:20Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:24:20Speaker 02

  And they can lean towards pessimism or helplessness.

• 1:24:22Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, that's what I mean.

• 1:24:23Speaker 02

  Which comes back to

• 1:24:24Trevor Noah?

  That's what that's exactly what I mean.

• 1:24:25Speaker 02

  Whereas you're trying to avoid.

• 1:24:26Trevor Noah?

  Whereas you you find. So maybe that would be a great thing to to help. I mean, because I think it would be great for everyone to have that feeling.

• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:34Trevor Noah?

  And that and that framework for life. What is it about the endless possibility of questions that leaves you feeling fulfilled as opposed to debilitatingly unknowing?

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  You know, there's this feeling of awe when you look at something that you already know is spectacular.

• 1:25:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  Like, you go and you look at, I've never seen this, but this is what I imagine the feeling of looking at, like, the aurora, like, the northern lights. Or, um, yeah, or like, um...

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  Apparently better on your phone.

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  Is it really?

• 1:25:20Speaker 02

  I just, I've just heard this.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  Well, you sound like a Debbie Downer.

• 1:25:24Trevor Noah?

  No, I'm, I'm just, from the guides, they say, they say, when you're there...

• 1:25:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  Okay, what's something that fills you with a sense of awe?

• 1:25:30Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, I just wanted to let you guys know that it's beautiful on your phone when you're there, because you should do something on this.

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  About why it, like, filters through your...

• 1:25:36Speaker 02

  Evolution is better.

• 1:25:38Trevor Noah?

  Apparently, your phone, and again, I'm only working on what I've heard from people who've gone there. And they've said that your guide even is like, because you know, some people are like, no, don't, don't pull out, because it's the nighttime sky, Eugene. You want me to be shouting at aurora borealis?

• 1:25:51Speaker 01

  We're feeling awe.

• 1:25:52Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, we're there. So, any could be anything, though. And they say, pull out your phone, and it looks better on the phone, you should check, you should look into that.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  Think about that feeling that you have, though, when you look at something that you know is astonishing. Actually, it's even better, for this story, when you're looking at something that humans built that's astonishing.

• 1:26:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:07Speaker 01

  I have that feeling, like, my show allows me to have that feeling a lot.

• 1:26:11Speaker 02

  Humans.

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:13Trevor Noah?

  Sorry, carry on.

• 1:26:14Speaker 02

  Pyramids.

• 1:26:15Trevor Noah?

  Don't, don't, don't interrupt.

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, humans.

• 1:26:18Speaker 02

  Why? It looks like you're accusing... The pyramids are the birch caliphate.

• 1:26:24Trevor Noah?

  And you were saying?

• 1:26:27Speaker 01

  I was saying, um, I have that feeling a lot. I have that feeling a lot about...

• 1:26:32Speaker 02

  Why are you whispering now?

• 1:26:33Trevor Noah?

  Because we're in the nighttime sky, Eugene.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  Feeling a feeling of awe.

• 1:26:36Speaker 02

  I'm sorry, I ruined the...

• 1:26:37Trevor Noah?

  I put us in the mood.

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  Um, of like, planes and vaccines and, you know, the fact that water comes out of a tap when you open it, like, there are...

• 1:26:50Trevor Noah?

  It is ridiculous.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  There are things that are ridiculous, and I feel very lucky to be alive right now, and I feel like... The next hundred years, I hope, will be even more interesting. And I have this incredibly rare opportunity that we all have to understand what that might look like. And there's so many things happening right now. The idea that I could get the opportunity to go understand quantum computers and bringing back supersonic planes and the Large Hadron Collider and artificial wombs and faster, more efficient cars and all of these things that I've had the chance to do. Theoretical physics by going in a zero-gravity plane, like, how incredibly lucky, first of all, to be able to tell those stories.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  But also, just as a person, this is the show that I wanted to watch. This is the thing that I felt like I was missing.

• 1:27:42Speaker 02

  Your version of Popular Mechanics for Kids.

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:45Speaker 02

  Remember that show?

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:27:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. But I think what you're explaining now is I have a theory that the next hundred years, we won't see any huge technological jumps.

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:27:55Speaker 02

  I think it will be, to explain it to people, will be the same as how we've been, as gamers, anticipating the release of Grand Theft Auto VI.

• 1:28:02Trevor Noah?

  Yes. Preach, brother.

• 1:28:04Speaker 02

  But then it keeps being postponed.

• 1:28:05Trevor Noah?

  It does indeed.

• 1:28:06Speaker 02

  And in its postponement, we've realized that there's so much we haven't explored in Grand Theft Auto V.

• 1:28:10Trevor Noah?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:28:11Speaker 02

  We keep discovering new universes, there's upgrades, it gets better and better. And we're like, now we've come out and said, but Grand Theft Auto VI can wait. But I think there's so much that we haven't explored about because we've been on this technological binge and gorge, as you were saying.

• 1:28:25Trevor Noah?

  We're just going to the next thing.

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  Just move.

• 1:28:27Trevor Noah?

  Before we.

• 1:28:28Speaker 02

  Devices, shows, information.

• 1:28:29Speaker 01

  That probably means, what do you mean by, like, big shift? Like, I think that's...

• 1:28:33Speaker 02

  Like, there won't be any new technology that blows us out the water.

• 1:28:36Trevor Noah?

  That's your bet.

• 1:28:37Speaker 02

  That's my 100% bet.

• 1:28:38Trevor Noah?

  Wow. We should save this.

• 1:28:40Speaker 02

  Please do.

• 1:28:41Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, I'm serious, just as like a bet. I'm interested.

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think...

• 1:28:45Trevor Noah?

  I don't think you're crazy, but I...

• 1:28:46Speaker 01

  I think you could end up right in a lot of different ways. So you could end up right where, like, we already have machine learning, so we already have, like, AI.

• 1:28:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  But there are lots of ways in which it isn't yet applied, right? We've just seen, you know, alpha folds. We've just seen, like, some of the beginnings of things that are going to be, hopefully, really interesting for our lives. And so I think in that sense, like... You could call those new technologies, or you could call them evolutions of what we're already seeing.

• 1:29:13Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:29:14Speaker 01

  But it's, it's, it happens over time. I think you're right that it's like a, it's, it's always one foot in front of the other.

• 1:29:18Speaker 02

  It's an improvement, it's an upgrade.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  It's always like that.

• 1:29:20Speaker 02

  But there will never be anything new. Because if you think about it, if we go-

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  Not in the sense of like, now we're back to aliens, oh no. Not in the sense of like, like something just like hits us, you know?

• 1:29:30Speaker 02

  Come back home.

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think anything's gonna hit us like a lightning bolt. But I think like, you get to be a part of, of the progress of technology. And I think that's a really exciting thing to lean into. So that you get to say what you think it should do for us.

• 1:29:46Speaker 02

  But the more we want something new, the more the underpinnings stay the same. Because if you think about it, we need, textile has been the same. Just a little bit improvement here and there. Farming, engineering. And that is the underpinnings of, engineering can fall under buildings, transportation and medication and science. And then obvious textile can fall into other, what we use to design, how we dress and how our, our homes look like and agriculture, how we stay alive. So I don't think anything new is gonna come. I think once people start doing hydroponics, we're like, we've reached the end, guys. We don't need so much.

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think in a certain sense, like, everything is, and this is, this is something I, I love about humans. Everything stands on the shoulders of what came before it. I can, I completely agree that like, nothing is new out of thin air. Everything is one step above what the people who came before you built. And I think that's actually a big part of what I'm trying to, to do is to explain. You know, for example, when I'm, when I'm trying to explain

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  new ways to communicate and like, like why, you know, everybody is trying to put

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  Satellites.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  Satellites to have the internet. Wow, you really know where I was going with this. You need to explain how the internet infrastructure works right now. You need to explain the cables on the bottom of the ocean. Like, there's, in, in order to understand what's next, you need to understand what's now. And we spend a lot of time doing that on the show, explaining like, okay, if you are, you know, trying to understand why we don't have supersonic planes, you need to understand the history of the Concorde. You need to understand how planes currently work. You need to understand what happens when there's a sonic boom over everything, right? That, that's a, I think there's so much that we can learn about the future from understanding what's happening right now. And I think- You know, one thing that we haven't touched on yet is

• 1:31:37Trevor Noah?

  How we use war to test out technologies?

• 1:31:39Speaker 01

  We did touch on that.

• 1:31:40Trevor Noah?

  Okay, sure.

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  You brought that in.

• 1:31:42Trevor Noah?

  He always does. Continue.

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  Is the way in which you get the opportunity to go down these rabbit holes and choose whatever you want to make is by

• 1:31:55Trevor Noah?

  Say more.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  Is by owning your own thing, by making your own thing. We haven't, we haven't talked about the fact that we're having this conversation on a show that you're publishing on YouTube and that you get to decide like how long this goes on for together. You guys are coming up with the ideas for

• 1:32:10Trevor Noah?

  Well, you're a part of it as well. You can just walk out. You could leave anytime.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm

• 1:32:14Trevor Noah?

  As you often do at parties, apparently. You could just, you could just bounce.

• 1:32:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're gonna transition.

• 1:32:19Trevor Noah?

  No, but you're right. And actually, you know what? I'm glad you brought that up because it's something that I've been fascinated about because I, I think you were, you were at the vanguard of a movement that wasn't particularly obvious at the time. There are many people who've started their own things because they were never part of something mainstream, which often makes more sense to me.

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:40Trevor Noah?

  Right? If you're not part of something, you will oftentimes create your own thing. You were definitely part of something and you were part of something that was quite popular, quite powerful and quite, um, you know, it was quite obvious, for lack of a better term. You then left when it wasn't obvious and you went off to do the least obvious thing in many ways. Help, help me understand that thinking. Like, what is it about the environment you were in and what is it about you as a person that made you go, I'm gonna go out there and I'm gonna try, create the world that I want to live in, even though it's a lot riskier than the world that I'm currently in?

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  Thank you for putting it that way. That's a, I mean,

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  I first got obsessed with the idea of this show. I mean, we spent a long time now talking about why I'm so obsessed with this idea. Like, I, I hope that you can see that it's like, it really comes from my desire to watch it, like my desire to make it creatively. Like, there's just this itch that's just kind of unbearable at a certain point. And I wanted, I wanted to make it and I wanted to know if other people wanted to watch it. I really, I mean, one of the most incredibly gratifying things about making Huge If True has been that all of a sudden there are other people who are

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  Along for the same ride you are, that feel the same itch that you do, that also felt like the journalism that they were getting was pessimistic, and it wasn't a full media diet, and they wanted something like this. Like, to be, um, to see that other people have the same feeling that you do is really, really gratifying. And I knew that in order to make something that had this kind of, to be honest, like, sharp edge, like, huge is different than other media that I consume. And that's not to say that other media isn't great. But I, there is, there are things that I'm saying I don't like about mainstream media. There are things that, like, the show has an incredible positivity and a joy.

• 1:34:42Speaker 01

  It also has an edge. It's saying, like, there is harm in being knee-jerk pessimistic. There is a, there is a point to this show. And we're doing things a different way. And that, that feeling, I just knew that I wouldn't be able to do that in the way that I really wanted to do it. And I wouldn't be able to test whether the actual thing that was in my brain was the thing that other people wanted if I was inside a big media company.

• 1:35:06Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:35:06Speaker 01

  Like, I just, I, to be clear, I wasn't offered the opportunity to make this show inside a big media company. But I didn't even, I didn't pitch it. I didn't, I didn't want to have the incentives and the constraints and the lack of control inside a media company.

• 1:35:21Trevor Noah?

  We talk about this all the time. We literally talk about this all the time.

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  You did this.

• 1:35:23Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  And in fact, and so that was the main, the main point, was I really wanted to make this show the way that I wanted to make it.

• 1:35:30Trevor Noah?

  Were you ever afraid of meeting us?

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:35:35Trevor Noah?

  Look at what it's done to you.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, all the time. Yeah. I think there's still, when you're, when you're making anything that you really love, I think there's an underlying fear of it first not working, then when it is working, oh, my God, it might go away. Like, there's a, you live with a kind of, when you're really doing something that you love, you live with a kind of healthy fear, I think. I think that's good. I think that feels good, actually, to not always feel, first, the fear of something not working means that I think you're pushing yourself creatively. Second, the fear of other people not liking it means that you are potentially making something that some people will dislike and some people will love. And that's probably healthy. And third,

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  There's just a fear of putting yourself out there. Like a fear of like doing what you want and it just

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  and it just not working or once you have success of it going away. And I want to feel that, like I want to feel that all the time. And so it felt much scarier to do to do this.

• 1:36:43Trevor Noah?

  Don't press anything. We've got more. What now after this? Everybody has that oddly specific thing that they're curious about. Maybe it's restoring old watches. Maybe it's Japanese ceramic making. Maybe it's watching someone explain why one bridge in a remote area of Norway is secretly better than all the other bridges in the world. YouTube always has exactly what you're looking for, even when you didn't know you were looking for it. With YouTube Premium, those deep dives feel even smoother. You get ad-free viewing, but you also get background play when you need your hands free. And you get offline downloads so you can keep watching wherever you happen to be, even if you happen to be off the grid.

• 1:37:28Trevor Noah?

  It's everything you already love about YouTube just somehow even better. Yeah, one of my favorite YouTube Premium features is smart downloads. Because how many times have you gone somewhere and realized, ah, I forgot to download anything? And now you're on the way to the airport and you're like, download, download, download, download. You're on the plane, download, download, download, download. There's no wifi. I wish I downloaded. Now, all of those things that you were gonna watch are just on the internet. Smart downloads basically thinks ahead for you. It automatically downloads recommended videos based on what you like to watch. So even when you forget to prepare, YouTube Premium didn't. I love it. It's like packing for a trip and discovering somebody already remembered the thing you always leave at home. It's always the underwear.

• 1:38:11Trevor Noah?

  If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Sign up now for your free trial at youtube.com/premium. Terms apply. Cancel anytime.

• 1:38:22Trevor Noah?

  I think one of the things you realize when you start caring about clothes is that simple doesn't have to mean basic. Because a T-shirt is a T-shirt. Until you find the right T-shirt. Ooh, then suddenly you're talking about the cut, the fit, the weight, the weight falls on your body. Then you're like, no, no, no, you don't understand. Look at the sleeve. And that's what I've really enjoyed about Quince. One of my favorite things is their Pima Cotton Lux Touch T-shirts. And it's become one of those pieces I keep reaching for. The cotton has this really smooth, premium feel to it. The fit is great. And it just lays really nicely. And I think that's what you sometimes take for granted with simple clothes. When they're done really well, they become the foundation of an entire outfit.

• 1:39:07Trevor Noah?

  You can throw on a jacket, a sweater, whatever you want, but everything works because you started with the right thing. That's what I like about Quince. It feels premium without feeling like you're trying too hard. It's effortless. So find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. Hello over there. Oh, and if Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was What Now with Trevor Noah. It's the best way to support the show.

• 1:39:48Speaker 03

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• 1:40:18Trevor Noah?

  Now that you're in it, how do you insulate yourself from the hedonic adaptation of the success? How do you? It's something that's always fascinated me when I, when I watch people in life. Someone's an actor, they just dream of getting an acting gig. And then they get into a movie and this is their dream. And then now they want to be one of the leads. And then they are one of the leads. And then they want to be the lead. And then they are the lead. Then they want to be a star. Then they are star. Then they want to be an A-list star. Then they're an A-list star. And then, and then all of a sudden, they spend all their days depressed that their box office numbers aren't what they used to be. I used to think that that was reserved, and maybe naively when I thought this, I thought

• 1:41:03Trevor Noah?

  it was reserved for like mainstream and industry. But you realize it applies to everything in life. And I see this with a lot of people on TikTok, on YouTube, who create and make. And they hit a high. And man, getting back to that a high or like, have you ever, I've, I've, I've always enjoyed doing this. I'll go to somebody's, like, let's say a TikTok goes viral, like mega viral, everyone's watching it. And then I'll go down a rabbit hole of that person's page. And it's amazing to see how they were just doing whatever they wanted to do. And then one video goes absolutely viral. And then watch how their whole page after that just becomes that video now.

• 1:41:43Speaker 02

  Alter their trajectory.

• 1:41:44Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but more importantly, it alters how they see themselves and what they should be or shouldn't be doing. So you find they're singing karaoke, they're cooking food in front of the camera, they're hanging out with their friends, they're doing all these things. And then the karaoke video goes viral. Then they hang out with their friends, nothing. Then they cook, nothing. Then they do karaoke again, semi-viral. And then you just see them make that their identity. How do you, how do you grapple with that? And like, do you have any safeguards? Do you have any ideas that you impose on yourself where you go, oh, this is how I always come back to me being me and not letting the clicks define who I become?

• 1:42:19Speaker 01

  It's not me, it's the show. Everything comes back to the mission of the show.

• 1:42:24Trevor Noah?

  I like that.

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  And so for me, I didn't start with a lot of different ways in which I could be popular on YouTube. I started with, I want to make this one show. Will it or will it not work? Do you also want this show?

• 1:42:38Trevor Noah?

  How do you define work, though? Like, will it work? What's your metric for will it work?

• 1:42:41Speaker 01

  Can I make things that I'm proud of that have this mission of showing people optimistic visions of the future so that they can help build them, the three pillars? Can I successfully do that and get better and better at it? And by the way, experiment in lots of different ways, the science fiction in the asteroid episode, the, you know, going to Formula One behind the scenes. Like, there are lots of different ways in which we experiment with formats and topics. But can I do something that meets this mission that we set out to with Huge If True? And also, do people want to watch that? Is that, because the reason why I am so ambitious with this show, I really want this show to be watched by many, many more people than it is now,

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  is because I actually think it accomplishes something that I want to happen in the world. I really think that if more people had generally a media diet that allowed them to see these visions more often and allowed them to participate more in the conversation and allowed them to explore how they could contribute to the world in an optimistic way, we'd all be better for it. And I wish more people were doing it, but right now, like, the way that I can accomplish that in the world is through making this show enormous. And so I had this incredibly strong ambition and motivation to make this show watched by millions and millions of people, which it already is, and it's growing. And I'm so incredibly proud of that.

• 1:44:05Speaker 01

  But at the same time, I'm not, I'm not trying to find the way in which they'll like me. I'm trying to see if they like this. There's a world in which nobody wanted to watch this, and then I just stopped.

• 1:44:19Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:44:20Speaker 01

  Because I wasn't, I wasn't experimenting, I didn't start out the channel by saying, you know, here I am, I'm gonna explore, like, I'm just gonna make things, like, come along with me for the journey.

• 1:44:28Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:44:28Speaker 01

  I said, I'm gonna make this show. And that, I think, has been really protective.

• 1:44:32Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, you've separated yourself from the project, from the work.

• 1:44:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then the other thing that's happened along the way.

• 1:44:38Trevor Noah?

  Isn't that in, sorry to interrupt you, I feel like that's That's in that book, I'm sure many people have said it, but in that book, The War of Art. I think one of the, it's really amazing. I think you'd enjoy it. But it talks about the complicated nature of artistry and the journey of making and what it means to create, right? To take something from nothing, bring it out into the world, make it something and then other people consume it. And one of the main things it speaks about is how the true mastery of being an artist requires you to know that you are not your work and your work is not you, but you have deep pride in that work. Because if you're unable to separate yourself from it, then in its success or in its failure, you will always define yourself.

• 1:45:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:21Trevor Noah?

  But if you go, this is a thing I made or did, do you like it? Yes, no? Alright, well, I made it.

• 1:45:27Speaker 02

  But I guess you are experiencing, there's always, what I find is a healthy amount of insecurity that comes with being an artist. And I think that's why even the greatest artists were either unhappy or they had to have paradigm shifts where they move elsewhere. You know, because I think when you catch on to a great idea, they always explain this, you have an antenna. Everyone has, ideas are floating around, but one person will catch it. But they have to have the naivety and the confidence to think that what they're thinking is unique. Then go out there and do it. And then if they've done it enough, they start thinking, well, if I'm here, like Einstein, he thinks if I'm here in Germany and everyone, maybe I must go somewhere else. Then he goes somewhere else, then he comes here. Then here they're like, tell us more about that thing of yours, because he goes, where I come from, me.

• 1:46:10Trevor Noah?

  Everyone's thinking this.

• 1:46:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Braun is here because he makes rockets. So clearly there's something there, so you go somewhere else. And that's where I think the analogy that I made about being in the living room and then going into the bedroom to see what's going on.

• 1:46:22Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:22Speaker 02

  Only to come back again to the living room, it comes into play. And I think if you don't move as an artist, and I think that's what you are, if you don't move, you've realized that you die. If you don't evolve, you perish.

• 1:46:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:34Speaker 02

  And then you try to create a show that makes us evolve forcefully at our pace and the comfort of our own homes and screens, right?

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  Thank you for saying that, yeah.

• 1:46:41Speaker 02

  Do you want this?

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:43Trevor Noah?

  That's beautiful, Eugene.

• 1:46:45Speaker 01

  I think, I think that's exactly right. Yeah. I.

• 1:46:50Speaker 01

  So I wanted that creative opportunity. I wanted that for myself. I wanted it for the show. I wanted it for the audience. Now I have this incredible team that I work with, that you asked also, how do I make sure that it stays the show? Like, they know what feels like huge.

• 1:47:06Speaker 02

  Oh, that's great.

• 1:47:07Speaker 01

  And they create a constraint.

• 1:47:09Speaker 02

  That's great.

• 1:47:09Speaker 01

  Like, there's a team culture and a team mission, and we're all together making this thing. And so I am the vessel to make the thing better on screen, but we're all making it together. And that, I think, is really important to maintain the mission of what you're doing. And so all of those things, I think, help a lot. And then there's also the enormous wave. I mean, we haven't talked yet about, I think, huge and what we're doing is part of at least three big trends in media right now.

• 1:47:44Speaker 02

  Okay, and what are those three?

• 1:47:46Speaker 01

  The first is that YouTube is eating television. I mean, YouTube has been the most-watched streaming platform for at least two years.

• 1:47:53Speaker 02

  It's eating it alive, which is very sad.

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  It's wild to watch.

• 1:47:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, don't wait for it to die first, it's kicking it.

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 1:48:00Trevor Noah?

  Bataca!

• 1:48:00Speaker 02

  Bataca!

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  By the way, I mean, you guys have been part of that.

• 1:48:10Trevor Noah?

  Sorry, it's a deep cut.

• 1:48:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a, sorry.

• 1:48:13Speaker 01

  And so you guys have been part of that. And the wave of YouTube allowing, I mean, because the bet that YouTube made was incredible, right? Like, every other streamer said, if we have a small number of gatekeepers and they decide what gets made, then that is the best stuff that most people will want to watch, and that's the stuff that should get made. And there's a whole business model around giving upfront money. You make the thing, you put the thing, you have a subscription, you watch the thing. And that's the philosophy that has grown every other streaming platform. And YouTube had a fundamentally different bet, which was if we give a platform and split

• 1:48:52Speaker 01

  advertising revenue with anyone in the world who could make great things, then if we wait and we allow that work to kind of improve and percolate upward and have a system that recommends the right work to the right people, then that is actually the way that we will get the work that the most people want to watch.

• 1:49:11Trevor Noah?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  That's a crazy bet.

• 1:49:13Trevor Noah?

  It really is.

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  That is a fundamentally different bet than every other streamer.

• 1:49:15Trevor Noah?

  It's important.

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  And it turns out it's working. And how incredible is it that that works?

• 1:49:19Trevor Noah?

  I'm torn though on it though.

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  That's fundamentally, yes, there's a lot of-

• 1:49:22Trevor Noah?

  I'll tell you why I'm torn, only because, obviously on the one side, I think it's amazing. I think to live in a world where people can create what they feel needs to be created if they don't see it, and people get to consume what they want to consume, like I have a friend who watches knife sharpening videos. That's pretty much all he does, is just like watch knife sharpening videos. Is he in this room?

• 1:49:44Speaker 01

  Is he good?

• 1:49:45Trevor Noah?

  He is in this room.

• 1:49:46Speaker 02

  He passed away. In this room, he means.

• 1:49:50Trevor Noah?

  Peshawar.

• 1:49:55Speaker 02

  Oh, he's here.

• 1:49:56Trevor Noah?

  He's here with us now. He's here with us now.

• 1:49:59Speaker 02

  I heard his voice screaming from the great beyond.

• 1:50:01Trevor Noah?

  Um, no, so like, but, but, but what I mean by that is I do think that part of it is amazing. Just like your show, what I like to try and do is also think about always the second system effect, what are we missing that we, we, we take for granted, because every gift comes a curse. And the other side of it is those institutions, while they were, and while they still are definitely flawed, they're a lot easier to hold accountable because you can find them. Do you know what I'm saying? So when the BBC says something that's wrong or that people don't like, they can find the BBC, they can like go after the BBC in a, in a very definite way. When Netflix has a show that people are not angry about, or you know what I mean? Like Diddy suing Netflix where he's like, I'm gonna sue you for the documentary, but

• 1:50:46Trevor Noah?

  he can't sue Netflix. But if that thing was put out on YouTube, just, it becomes a little more opaque, it becomes a little less tangible, it becomes, and so it's like, that's why I say I'm torn, because it's this world where it's like, ah, you want people to have as much freedom as possible to put out what they like, but we also don't want to live in a world where- The ultimate harms can be done because nobody can be held accountable. Do you know what I mean? Like, I'm sure you think about that as well.

• 1:51:12Speaker 01

  And it's made even more complicated by the second trend, which is that people like all of us, who might have been employees at large companies, then go independent. And so the trend, I mean, I'm thinking, yeah, I'm thinking of the trend, particularly in journalism, of people going independent. But it's true in many other places, too. It's obviously true in comedy. It's true in lots of different industries. And so that, I would say, I'm a part and huge is a part, and you're a part of this second trend of independence that is created by the first trend of the success of YouTube. And then the third trend is maybe it's a part of a story about pessimism itself.

• 1:51:56Speaker 01

  It's part of a story about the feeling that people have about news and the world getting worse and the feeling that news has

• 1:52:06Speaker 01

  contributed to our understanding of the world getting worse. And huge is something different. And so those, I think, are the three stories in the world that we are somehow in the middle of the Venn diagram on. And it's an interesting place to be because, to your point, there are all kinds of parts of those stories. There are the shadow sides of each of those things. There's the extreme upside of like, what if? What if these trends continue? And, you know, I mean, we're already at a place, it's so interesting to look at the difference between when I launched just three years ago and where we are now. I mean, the story when I launched was like, new media is coming. This is something that is coming. Like, we're long since here. Like, that story makes no sense anymore.

• 1:52:51Speaker 01

  Like, we are already running shows that are larger than any other media company on the largest streaming platform in the world.

• 1:53:00Speaker 01

  And so that's That's really important and interesting. And to your point about accountability, like, how do, how do people that have, are now independently running these shows that are bigger than the media operations on the biggest platform in the world, how do they take responsibility, as you said, for the things that they publish?

• 1:53:18Speaker 01

  And so it's, it's a, it's a really exciting time. I'm obviously, I'm in true to form, very optimistic about where this is all going. But I, I think it's, it's interesting and complicated and thrilling. And I remember, I've been wanting to ask you this question because I remember when I left Vox and I got a lot of congratulations. But a lot of it was with this tone of like,

• 1:53:48Speaker 01

  oh, I wouldn't, I would never do that. Or like, oh, the phrase a lot of the time was, that's so brave.

• 1:53:55Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I love that phrase.

• 1:53:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:56Trevor Noah?

  So brave.

• 1:53:57Speaker 01

  And, and I got a DM on Twitter from you. And you said, congratulations. Like, best of luck. And this was when you were on The Daily Show.

• 1:54:13Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:14Speaker 01

  And I had been watching your stuff for a long time. And I had no idea that you were watching Vox and you were watching mine. And so I'd announced that I was going independent and you said, best of luck. And I mean, I've, I've said this to you before, but like, it was a real moment for me to say like, oh,

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  I knew I was already making the bet, but it was incredibly helpful to hear from someone who had a show that was, let's be honest, like, the definition of mainstream success, say like, best of luck, basically like, I think this is a good choice for you.

• 1:54:52Speaker 01

  So, thank you.

• 1:54:53Trevor Noah?

  You're welcome. But for me, it's, it's an obvious one. And Eugene and I have been on this journey for what, 20 years now?

• 1:55:03Trevor Noah?

  I've, I think it's two things. One, I love appreciating the people who've made an impact in my life even from afar. Do you know what I mean? So in my whole journey, whether it was on the Daily Show or not, I remember like in my whole life, every comedian who like put me on on some stage or introduced me to another comedian or promoter in another country. I remember journalists who wrote great pieces who helped me understand the world that I was trying to understand. I, I, authors who've literally changed my life. I try and have them on this podcast now. And some of them will say to me, they'll be like, I wrote that book 10 years ago. And I'm like, yeah, but it's still with me now.

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:41Trevor Noah?

  You know, they're like, why did you call me now? There's literally some people will come to the show and go, I haven't done anything in 10 years. And I'm like, yeah, but it stayed with me for 10 years. That's the first part. The second part is

• 1:55:53Trevor Noah?

  exactly what you said is, is the

• 1:55:57Trevor Noah?

  the unsafe bet. And I think there's a misalignment oftentimes in how we act in society versus what we say. We will say we want to explore. We will say we want people to God and try things. We will say we want, what we often want is the reward from these things. We want huge, if true, we want the show now that it's working. But we don't really want people to God and like try it in that way. And, and I don't know what it does to people, but you, you have spoken a lot about it. It makes people uncomfortable when people, as Eugene says, go rogue. It, it, it's interesting how it makes people around you uncomfortable.

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:39Trevor Noah?

  The amount of people who said that to me, and by the way, this has been the story of my life. When I, when I first started doing stand-up comedy, I had been lucky enough to get a job on a radio station at 3 a.m. on the weekends in Johannesburg, in like in Gauteng only, right? So it's one state, one province.

• 1:56:57Speaker 02

  Regional.

• 1:56:58Trevor Noah?

  Regional. And that's where I was. No one listened. I knew all my listeners by name, tiny little thing, but it paid my bills. I started comedy while doing that. Comedy grew and I was lucky enough that comedy, it just got to the point where I had to choose which one I was gonna do. I chose comedy. Everyone said,

• 1:57:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:15Trevor Noah?

  what are you doing? You have a great op, what are you doing?

• 1:57:19Speaker 02

  You step away from being at breakfast.

• 1:57:21Trevor Noah?

  And the thing it made me-

• 1:57:22Speaker 02

  You're one slot away.

• 1:57:24Trevor Noah?

  What it made me realize even at that time was

• 1:57:28Trevor Noah?

  Not only did they not see the possibility that I was aiming for,

• 1:57:33Trevor Noah?

  it made them uncomfortable.

• 1:57:36Trevor Noah?

  Because if you're on, if you're living on an island, someone gets on a boat and says, I'm sailing somewhere else that we cannot see. You'll be shocked at how it makes the people on that island angry and uncomfortable.

• 1:57:48Trevor Noah?

  Because they're like, are you saying this isn't it? Are you, people start to internalize things. They go, are you, are you saying I'm boring for staying on this island? Or are you saying there's a better island out there? Are you saying this island might not exist in a few years?

• 1:58:01Speaker 02

  It highlights their insecurities.

• 1:58:02Trevor Noah?

  And all of a sudden, people get angry at you. How could you? Why would you leave? What are you doing? Fox, are you kidding? And so whenever I see people who do that, you know what I mean? It, for some reason, it, it sparks something in me. We only want to leave when everything's fallen apart. We only want to explore when we're forced to go. And I often think to myself, wouldn't it be beautiful if you could find those opportunities and those moments? To do it in like a good leave with energy, you know? Don't escape, embark. There's a different feeling in, in both of them. And so for me, it was one of those things where I was like, what you're doing was crazy. It was genuinely crazy and I was so impressed by it. I was like, ah, I mean, I've loved the stuff you've made. Good luck. You're gonna kill it out there. You've got the talent.

• 1:58:46Trevor Noah?

  Those types of people, you're one of them as well. Those types of people who inspire me, because I go like, what are you doing? Oh, boy. All right, well, that's a crazy thought. Like with Eugene, it was like the opposite. Eugene like just took a break at some point. And I was like, what are you doing? And he's just like, yeah, I'm taking a break. It's like, phew, he's taking a break. He's like, yeah, I'm just gonna pause for a while. And I remember, it's the craziest things. I was so inspired by the fact that this human being showed me

• 1:59:14Trevor Noah?

  that there was the option to take a break, even though you don't know what's on the other side of that break. So in all of these, I'm just like, yeah, man. And, and by the way, I didn't think you were making the right choice. I just thought you were making a good choice.

• 1:59:29Speaker 02

  Good choice, yeah.

• 1:59:30Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting, because the question I wanted to ask you, if I'm, if I'm honest about that message, what you said was, I've been wondering when you're gonna do that. And I thought to myself, two things.

• 1:59:40Speaker 02

  Sounds like him.

• 1:59:41Speaker 01

  I, I thought to myself, two things. The first was, you know who I am?

• 1:59:47Speaker 01

  When did you start wondering this? And the second thing I thought was, how did you know that that was even an option? Like, because for me, going independent on YouTube, there was at least one person, Johnny Harris and Iz Harris, who were building a journalistic independent media group. He had left Vox. And so there was at least one example that I could see of someone doing this well. But until I actually began thinking about doing it, it didn't feel like one of the options that was available to me. And I thought it was going to be the start of what has now become true, which is this wave of sort of people going independent, both in journalism and in comedy and in all walks of life.

• 2:00:32Speaker 01

  But at the time, like, how did you know that that was an option? Because my perception is I should have been more likely to know that that was true than you, who were at the kind of the pinnacle of mainstream media success.

• 2:00:50Trevor Noah?

  So I didn't know that it was an option, but I think I sometimes have, I don't know if it's just an innate ability, but I can oftentimes spot somebody who is an outlier in the environment that they're in. And it doesn't necessarily mean that they don't gel with their environment. I just go like, yeah, you're gonna leave. And not leave in a bad way, you're just, you're gonna leave. Does that make sense? Because there's something about you that tells me you are going to do something that goes beyond this. So on your side, I mean, now I'd have to be like trying to go back and remember what it was, but maybe just having this conversation with you, I was probably thinking at the

• 2:01:35Trevor Noah?

  time, you're creating these explainers, you're making this world really interesting, entertaining, positive, despite what the content is. It was all about like Congress and the Senate. And this is not a positive world, and it's not necessarily an interesting world.

• 2:01:51Speaker 02

  And exciting.

• 2:01:53Trevor Noah?

  But it is definitely a limited world. You know what I mean? And so maybe I saw in you something that maybe I'd hope to see in myself, which was, oh, I'm not only this thing. Yeah, I love politics, but I'm not only that. You know what I mean?

• 2:04:27Trevor Noah?

  But it doesn't mean that you should only vibrate at the strongest frequencies. Explore the other ones.

• 2:04:31Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 2:04:32Trevor Noah?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 2:04:33Speaker 02

  The faint signal.

• 2:04:33Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, there's this faint signal that's also wonderful to have. And so, I don't know. I I I think it was something like that with you. I was just like, when I'd see you there, I'd go, but this can't be the only thing that you find interesting. So it's only a matter of time before, I assume, you're just gonna go and make your own thing somehow, somewhere. So when it happened, I wasn't I wasn't particularly shocked. I was like, oh, yeah, all right. I was waiting to see when this would happen.

• 2:05:00Speaker 02

  I think um.

• 2:05:03Speaker 02

  Sometimes when you revisit the past, you get to see what the present and the future will definitely look like. What you guys are explaining now and from hearing this is is no different from how ancient civilizations always rewarded and found a way to crowdfund. Well, they called it something else back then, to crowdfund philosophers. And those philosophers should have apprentices. And those apprentices will one day become the philosophers of their time. And the written word was the only way that those philosophers, was their was their YouTube.

• 2:05:33Trevor Noah?

  Interesting.

• 2:05:34Speaker 02

  So those people were paid to think of ideas, to envision how politics should be, and how art and culture, and if you had a great idea, if you could think, if you could paint, if you could sculpt, pay this person to just do that thing. And that's how civilizations are born. And I think we might just not see this now, but two hundred years from now, if someone looks at this portal that was open, which is YouTube, which is equivalent to thousand years ago to written and spoken word scrolls.

• 2:05:58Trevor Noah?

  It's like a the press, yeah.

• 2:06:00Speaker 02

  Same thing. This footprint, these ideas, they will never be new again. Everything that you're speaking about now might be obvious in a hundred years, but will never be new again. And I guess that's the whole thing. That's the whole synergy. And that's what you've been good at spotting. You know, you've you've spoken a lot of people off their cliffs and given them their careers without even knowing is the ability to see another philosopher. And go, if you explore this idea further, you might hit the jackpot of your own independence, of your own freedom and of your own autonomy, because that's the ultimate reward. And I think that's why super thoughtful people who are philosophers, financial reward is never their aim. It's autonomy. It's them feeling like I can do what I want, when I want.

• 2:06:43Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:43Speaker 02

  And once you've reached that, that's the pinnacle. And I think YouTube is exactly that, right?

• 2:06:47Trevor Noah?

  I think everyone benefits. That's the most important thing as well.

• 2:06:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:51Trevor Noah?

  Is the understanding that everyone can benefit from it. That's what, that's what I also find selfishly, I'm going as a fan of yours. Well, I hope I see more. Same with your comedy. You remember even from back in the day, I was like, when, when, when Eugene?

• 2:07:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:07:04Trevor Noah?

  I'm waiting for this. I'm waiting for that. I'm waiting. You know what I mean? Yeah. I'm selfishly, I'm going this, this, this benefits me. So I'm assuming it benefits others.

• 2:07:12Speaker 02

  Basically, what you're saying is Michelangelo didn't spend years upside down, painting the ceiling of the, of the basilica for him to look at it. He did it for other people.

• 2:07:22Speaker 01

  That's beautiful.

• 2:07:23Trevor Noah?

  That is.

• 2:07:23Speaker 01

  And so what's it, what's it been like? What, what is, if the lesson is an ability to more fully experiment with or express who you are? What's it been like for you? What do you feel like you're able to express now? What are you trying to experiment with?

• 2:07:38Trevor Noah?

  That's an interesting question, Dan.

• 2:07:45Trevor Noah?

  Okay, so here's, here's, here's the analogy I would use. I think a lot of life is us trying to climb a mountain. And a lot of the times, that mountain is often introduced to us by others. They tell us, hey, that mountain over there, man, if you can climb that mountain, phew, you've done it. And so then we, we grow up our whole lives going, okay, mountain, all right, mountain, one day. And then at some point you start, you start climbing the mountain, you start climbing the mountain. While you're climbing the mountain, you might meet some people along the way who've either come down or have settled at certain parts of it and they'll, you know, they'll be like, oh yeah, the mountain, welcome to the mountain, yeah, the mountain, yeah, mountain, mountain, yeah, mountain, we go to the top, we'll see at the mountain.

• 2:08:30Trevor Noah?

  And you're climbing it. And if you ask yourself the question, why am I climbing it? It's because I've, I've always wanted to climb. I've always, you know? It's only when you get to what you have to define as your peak, that you stop and go, oh, this is lovely. This was hard.

• 2:08:49Trevor Noah?

  But what mountains do I wanna climb? Do I wanna go walk in valleys?

• 2:08:53Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:08:54Trevor Noah?

  Do I wanna stroll along rivers? Do I want to? Oh, I've I've now climbed what mountains people hoped I would climb. So now what would I like to do? And in that exploration, it's terrifying because first of all, success or failure becomes like a, you know, everyone has the, oh, when are you, uh, you gonna get back to mountain? And you're like, no.

• 2:09:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:18Trevor Noah?

  You know?

• 2:09:18Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:09:19Trevor Noah?

  Like, one of the number one things people ask me in general is like, so what's, uh, what's next? That's that's why I named the podcast, I was like, what now? So what now?

• 2:09:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:27Trevor Noah?

  What now? And I was like, what do you mean? And they're like, so what, uh, well, whatever. I'm like, I'm gonna live life. And they go, yeah, but I mean, beyond that. Like, what is beyond living life? And now I get to enjoy all of that more. I wouldn't have had the time before to sit down with you like this and to sit down with one of my best friends and explore and learn and have a deeper understanding of how you create and, you know what I mean? Get into the mind of somebody who's gonna be shaping generations to come because of her work. You, I wouldn't have the time. And so everything in life I find now is, there's a, there's a beautiful book that I, that I read. We should have, we should have the author on if he'll join us. It was a book called Four Thousand Weeks. And it's a book that just breaks down that the average human has about four thousand weeks on this planet.

• 2:10:13Trevor Noah?

  How do you wanna spend those weeks? And when you understand the limited nature of those weeks, you also understand that you're always gonna be missing something because you're doing something else. And so instead, instead of, instead of having FOMO, rather enjoy this thing that you're actually experiencing. So when you're at this party, don't think about the party you're missing. Or don't, when you're at home, don't think about the party you're missing. Be like, ah, can't believe I'm in my bed right now. What a joy. And there I genuinely have found some of the most fun and the most joy and the most like. And so when people ask me these questions, sometimes people be like, wow, but I mean, you, what do you, what do you, what do you, so what do you? And I'm like, well, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, maybe nothing. I see them get uncomfortable on my behalf.

• 2:10:58Trevor Noah?

  And I'm like, no.

• 2:11:01Speaker 01

  Maybe this is because I'm trying to climb my mountain.

• 2:11:03Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:11:05Speaker 01

  But do you ever think about the fact that this mountain might be bigger?

• 2:11:08Trevor Noah?

  It's always gonna be bigger.

• 2:11:09Speaker 01

  But like, the, the, the, what you, the what you are doing right now is part of, like, we talked about this, this wave, that there is a very real future.

• 2:11:19Trevor Noah?

  So now, yes.

• 2:11:20Speaker 01

  Where in literal terms, in the success terms that people used to talk to you about.

• 2:11:24Trevor Noah?

  That's so funny.

• 2:11:25Speaker 01

  This actually could be the bet that is the biggest thing you ever make, that is, ah, that is like, it like, and that's kind of hard to keep together, right? Because what you're expressing is a very healthy psychology of like, I'm doing this because I want to do this.

• 2:11:39Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 2:11:39Speaker 01

  But at the same time, there is a reality here where you're experiencing this wave of independent owned media, and you own it, and you're making something that, I don't know what the Daily Show viewership was, I don't know what your viewership is right now, but like, in a very real way, this could be or become the biggest thing you ever make, because you're all of a sudden part of this, this new mountain.

• 2:12:01Trevor Noah?

  It's, it's.

• 2:12:02Speaker 01

  Hard to do, hold those things at the same time.

• 2:12:04Trevor Noah?

  I think that's exactly what I do, is hold them both at the same time. I'll tell you why. When Eugene and I started doing comedy in South Africa, at the time, comedy was how many years old?

• 2:12:17Speaker 02

  Sure, less than.

• 2:12:18Trevor Noah?

  Like, like, stand-up comedy, and I mean this.

• 2:12:20Speaker 02

  Less than ten.

• 2:12:21Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, because remember, we didn't have free speech in South Africa because of apartheid, right? So it's not, that's what I mean by stand-up comedy widespread people doing. It wasn't really a thing.

• 2:12:28Speaker 02

  Less than, less than ten.

• 2:12:29Trevor Noah?

  You have the first wave of comedians who jumps out and they start doing the comedy, right? We were like the second wave, I would argue.

• 2:12:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:12:35Trevor Noah?

  But it was a relatively young scene. There were no comedy clubs. This was not a structure or a thing. I remember once my mom saying to me, what do you do? Like, where are you going? And I said, I, I do stand-up comedy. And my mom said to me, Trevor, this lifestyle of selling drugs is gonna catch up with you.

• 2:12:59Trevor Noah?

  And I said, what? And she said, Mthanam, this lifestyle of selling drugs is gonna catch up with you.

• 2:13:06Speaker 01

  She was so gentle with it.

• 2:13:07Trevor Noah?

  And I said, Mom, I don't sell drugs. I do comedy. And she says, Putti, she said that,

• 2:13:14Trevor Noah?

  save your lies for others. This lifestyle will not end well. And I was like, Mama. And she said, even ask us, what do you, where do you say your money comes from? And I said, I go and I tell jokes. And she's like, my child. And then she just walked into the house calm. But she's like, that's how, I don't know what it was like for you when you first told someone what you do.

• 2:13:32Speaker 02

  There were cops in my bedroom. Then my mom was like, I told him.

• 2:13:37Speaker 02

  This lifestyle won't end well.

• 2:13:40Trevor Noah?

  But you know what I mean? That's how, that's how random it was, right? So.

• 2:13:48Trevor Noah?

  But I, there was, there's this spark. And I, this is what I always encourage people to do this is I go.

• 2:13:56Trevor Noah?

  Remember that you need to do things to survive. And you also need to do things to thrive. We oftentimes forget the latter.

• 2:14:06Trevor Noah?

  Survival is important. I'll never tell anybody, I don't like it when people go like, chase your dreams, throw everything else. No, no, no, no, no, no. Hey, survive. Survive, work, survive. Come on, get that thing going. But also don't forget to find ways to thrive. I'm always searching for ways to thrive. So comedy was that. When we did it, genuinely, there was no money in it. There was no industry in it. There was no.

• 2:14:26Speaker 02

  No one cared.

• 2:14:27Trevor Noah?

  This was the thing we did. We met each other at, it's like a local bowling alley and telling jokes type thing. That's how, that's the vibe. Then at some point, it seemed obvious, right? When I was gonna do the Daily Show, it wasn't obvious at all. In fact, it was, it was, it was a failure for, I'd say, like, the first year and a half at least. It was an utter failure.

• 2:14:48Speaker 02

  In fact, you didn't come here to do the Daily Show.

• 2:14:50Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I didn't.

• 2:14:50Speaker 02

  Which is what people get wrong sometimes.

• 2:14:52Trevor Noah?

  No, I was here doing stand-up comedy, doing stand-up. And then I was home, and then the Daily Show, Jon Stewart phoned me and was like, please come do one episode. We did one. And then he tricked me and trapped me, and I still hold it against him. And also, I'm grateful to him forever for it. But like.

• 2:15:06Trevor Noah?

  That thing, I I hope I never lose it and I hope everyone has the opportunity to experience it. Because what happens is you bump into the things, right? So Joe Rogan, for instance, is one of the people I speak about this. It seems obvious that UFC is the biggest, you know, fighting platform now and it's worth all this money. But when Joe Rogan was starting in UFC, it was this fringe, they used to call it cage fighting. Cage fighters and Joe Rogan loved it and people did it and and then they were like, do you want to comment? He's like, I want, he was, I think he was the one who was like, can I come and commentate on this thing? People like, you know about it? Now it seems obvious.

• 2:15:48Speaker 02

  Now.

• 2:15:49Trevor Noah?

  It was his passion, it was his joy, he did that thing. And now it seems obvious. And so I I think sometimes we make the mistake of only thinking about where we'll go because it might become something. And not just because we want to do, the Wright brothers did not think, I I would say, I don't know, you you've probably read more on it. I don't think they thought about airline industries.

• 2:16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:11Trevor Noah?

  The Wright brothers were probably just like, man.

• 2:16:13Speaker 02

  Proving their girlfriend's wrong.

• 2:16:14Trevor Noah?

  Wouldn't it be cool to fly?

• 2:16:18Speaker 02

  They just wanted to prove their girlfriends wrong.

• 2:16:20Trevor Noah?

  You're never gonna fly, Mark.

• 2:16:22Speaker 02

  The next thing, air crash investigation, oh damn.

• 2:16:25Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe they were the the version of the teacher that said, imagine you could fly.

• 2:16:31Trevor Noah?

  Exactly.

• 2:16:31Speaker 01

  And they said, oh.

• 2:16:33Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:33Speaker 02

  What an interesting idea. They read an article that said, this thing will never happen.

• 2:16:37Trevor Noah?

  This thing will never, yeah, so I think, I think that's all it is, you know. Um, yeah, and and that's that's why you're here. So thank you, thank you for this, by the way, thank you for the conversation.

• 2:16:45Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 2:16:46Trevor Noah?

  Most importantly, thank you for putting you out there because we've all benefited from it.

• 2:16:50Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:16:51Trevor Noah?

  And I can't wait to see what you do now. I mean, I'm in curling in a way that I didn't need to be.

• 2:16:57Speaker 01

  In February, I'll have a video for you.

• 2:16:59Trevor Noah?

  I was really gonna watch for the jokes, but now I'm there for the science as well. She did it again, folks. Cleo's done it again. This was fun, thank you.

• 2:17:08Speaker 01

  This was awesome, thank you guys.

• 2:17:11Speaker 01

  All right, cheers.

• 2:17:15Trevor Noah?

  Thank you very much, for real. Thank you so much.

• 2:17:17Speaker 01

  Michael.

• 2:17:17Speaker 02

  You were with the hype. You were like, you delivered and surpassed.

• 2:17:22Trevor Noah?

  What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Day Zero Productions in partnership with Sirius XM. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jess Hackel. Rebecca Chain is our producer. Our development researcher is Marcia Robiu. Music, mixing and mastering by Hannes Brown. Random other stuff by Ryan Parduth. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next week for another episode of What Now.

• 2:17:55Speaker 04

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• 2:18:25Speaker 03

  Time for a quick break to talk about McDonald's. It's the tangiest time of the year. For a limited time, head to McDonald's and get a McRib sandwich. Make it a meal by adding a medium fries and a soft drink like an ice cold Diet Dr. Pepper. So grab a McRib sandwich and embrace the tang. Save time by ordering ahead on the app at participating McDonald's for a limited time. Dr. Pepper is a registered trademark of Dr. Pepper, 7-Up Inc.